↑ Backdoors

With the advance of E2EE, secret services will still want access to our data and the amount of Ghost protocols and backdoors is likely to increase.

Protecting against backdoors can be difficult, but there are some things that can help reduce the risk of a breach of this kind.

Individuals

• Most backdoors can be removed by reinstalling the system from a backup that is clean and was kept secure.

• Pay special attention to open-source based software. Open-source projects have hundreds of (mirroring) sites (an enormous attack surface). Be picky, very picky.

• Use firewalls that block entry points from all but authorised users, making a port binding backdoor attack nearly impossible.

Organisations

• Robust network monitoring, meaning including intrusion detection systems (IDS) and intrusion prevention systems (IPS). Monitoring can help detect information being gathered by a command and control server and flag it with network administrators.

• Some backdoors emulate network traffic, but a machine learning program may still catch those.