If you have journalists/activists willing to go to information war with a nation-state, they shouldn't be surprised when their adversaries have the resources to pwn them. If you're going to be actively targeted by exploits like this, then you shouldn't give a damn about some of these tradeoffs. Ditto you if your ever in Dublin (Ireland, not that fake one in California :) or London! P.S Definitely, I'm on the West Coast probably once a year. Especially if we want to be sensible and try to tailor advice, training and tools to their realistic threat models. Skills fade for digital security training with journalists/activists is often quite high, especially if they don't need it that often.ĭon't get me wrong, I think it's great (as is Qubes, Subgraph etc) but we need to be realistic about it's limitations for the majority of people. TAILS often requires training, which not everyone has access to People lose the USB sticks they put TAILS on (also many counterfeits, so they often fail or have a false size) In developing states, hardware tends to be slow (often counterfeit) so running TAILS in RAM is slow In developing states, computer literacy is low, so anything other than the norm (Windows) is confusing
It often has driver problems - e.g Macbook Pro 2015 WIFI issues Documentation and TAILS is only available in certain languages It's hard to access files on other drives
It's Linux based, so a big mental jump for most people coming from Windows (or most people not at the command line on OS X) They can't run their regular programs on it - MS Office, Outlook, Adobe, etc.
People get annoyed as it doesn't solve their problems and exposure on mobile People get frustrated with Captcha (Dam Cloudflare!) and other things caused by using Tor in a safe manner. People get frustrated with speeds of Tor etc It's tricky for a non-technical user to setup As EMET has hardening against attacks like this, I am curious if this exploit works at all on EMET-enabled Windows systems.
Also, as the whole VM goes away when it's closed, you're not getting persistence on that machine if you just pop the browser.Ī 30 second glance at the source code makes it looks like this exploit pivots to attacker-controlled memory on the heap, and spawns a thread using kernel32.dll. IMO the best practical mitigation against these attacks is sandboxing with an amnesic system like Tails, as even as a VM it will leak a lot less information about the machine it is running on and requires burning both a Firefox 0day and a VM escape to get any real information outside of the real IP address of the user and some basic things out of /proc (although Tails may protect against the latter now). This is neither the first nor is the last 0day in Firefox that will affect TBB. TBB is not a solution against targeted deanonymization attacks. Either that or turn on NoScript and inform people what bad shit can happen when their browser is interpreting arbitrary code in a not-so-sandboxed manner. If TBB leads want to run Firefox with JavaScript "default on", then Tor Browser Bundle needs to be messaged as insecure.