Researchers Solve Juniper Backdoor Mystery; Signs Point to NSA

Security researchers believe they have finally solved the mystery around how a sophisticated backdoor embedded in Juniper firewalls works. Juniper Networks, a tech giant that produces networking equipment used by an array of corporate and government systems, announced that it had discovered two unauthorized backdoors in its firewalls, including one that allows the attackers to decrypt protected traffic passing through Juniper’s devices. The researchers’ findings suggest that the National Security Agency may be responsible for that backdoor, at least indirectly.

Even if the NSA did not plant the backdoor in the company’s source code, the spy agency may in fact be indirectly responsible for it by having created weaknesses the attackers exploited. Evidence uncovered by Ralf-Philipp Weinmann, founder and CEO of Comsecuris, a security consultancy in Germany, suggests that the Juniper culprits repurposed an encryption backdoor previously believed to have been engineered by the NSA, and tweaked it to use for their own spying purposes.