German GCHQ says Microsoft Windows 8 unsafe for government use after NSA snooping claims

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Germany's Federal Office for Information (BSI) security agency, the equivalent of the UK's GCHQ spy agency, has slammed Windows 8's security, following reports that the NSA placed a back door in it to spy on companies.

The claim stemmed from Investment Watch, which reported receiving a leaked BSI document claiming that Microsoft built a back door into Windows 8 letting it, or the NSA, hijack control of the machine from the end-user. At the time of publishing the BSI had not responded to V3's request for comment on the report.
However, since then the BSI issued a statement claiming to have also discovered errors in Windows 8's coding. The errors reportedly mean that companies could lose control of their systems if they deploy Windows 8 on machines with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip.

"From the perspective of the BSI, the use of Windows 8 in combination with a TPM 2.0 [chip] is accompanied by a loss of control over the operating system and the hardware used. This result for the user, especially for the federal government and critical infrastructure, new risks," read the statement as translated by Google.

The news is troubling, as the TPM is a specialised chip installed in many business PC systems. It is designed to perform hardware authentication and is able to store information like encryption keys, digital certificates and passwords.
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