US Military Wants To HACK Foreign Game Consoles, Steal User Information. Dastardly ++

The  Department of the Navy must have been watching some Dateline. Their latest and greatest way to spend tax payer money is to employ a company to boat a shitload of used gaming consoles overseas, and then till those consoles for user information. Have to get those terrorists’ information from them video game killer-builder machines.

Kotaku:

The Department of the Navy is looking  veryclosely at used video game consoles. Only, they don’t want to play them. They want to crack them open and steal all the information on overseas users they can get their hands on.

To that end, the Department has contracted a company called Obscure Technologies to go overseas, buy a mountain of pre-owned video game consoles and obtain as much “significant and sensitive information from previous users” as it’s possible to get.

Why overseas? Because of the nature of the work, they’re not allowed to target any “US persons”.

Obscure will be given just under USD$200,000 to undertake the work, mostly aimed at developing tools for getting the data and determining just how feasible such a process is. Attempts will then be made to gather the information both from the storage of the console itself, as well as “analyzing network traffic”.

The company was awarded the contract because “its lead scientist [has] previously reverse engineered the Microsoft XBOX”.

To recap, in case you haven’t really caught the gist of this yet, if you live outside the USA and have ever traded in a current-gen video game console, you’re now at risk – a remote risk, but a risk nonetheless – of having your “significant and sensitive information” obtained by the US military.