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NSA Hacking Unit Targets Computers Worldwide

HeadlineMay 30, 2013

New details have emerged about a secretive unit inside the National Security Agency called Tailored Access Operations that hacks into foreign computers to conduct cyber-espionage. According to a Bloomberg BusinessWeek article titled “How the U.S. Government Hacks the World,” the Pentagon hackers harvest nearly 2.1 million gigabytes every hour. That is the equivalent of hundreds of millions of pages of text. For years, the NSA did not acknowledge the unit’s existence, but a Pentagon official confirmed the unit conducts what it calls “computer network exploitation.” The U.S. cyberspies have also developed methods to obscure their tracks or disguise themselves as something else, such as hackers from China.

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