NSA’s Spying Program, MUSCULAR
The details of the NSA’s spying program, MUSCULAR, disclosed by Edward Snowden, may prove to have the greatest impact of any breach in 2013. According to J.J. Thompson, managing director and CEO of Rook Security, the MUSCULAR program involved intercepting data from Yahoo and Google private clouds where the data is unencrypted. The data collected included email, pictures, video, text documents, spreadsheets, and an array of other similar file types. And as Zack Whittaker pointed out in a ZDNet article:
In efforts to get "free access" to the traffic that flows between data centers, the NSA had to "circumvent gold standard security measures," according to the [Washington] Post.
With this new revelation, Google has taken a considerably stronger stance against the NSA’s spying programs, Thompson stated, adding:
And, along with Microsoft, has begun encrypting its internal network traffic. These and other major tech companies are using every resource at their disposal to fight the NSA including public relations and lobbying efforts. It is likely the greatest level of national attention ever paid to a security incident.