The National Security Agency has planted spy software and hardware into 100,000 computers worldwide, not 50,000 as previously reported.
These bugs allow the agency to conduct surveillance even on computers that are offline — or air-gapped, as they are referred to in spy lingo, per documents leaked by Edward Snowden.
See also: Report: Benefit of NSA Spying Is 'Overblown'
The implants are tiny radio transceivers that must be surreptitiously planted inside a computer, either before being shipped to manufacturers or afterward by an agent with access to the computer as part of a so-called "black bag job." The transceivers, which can look like normal USB plugs, then "infiltrate" and "exfiltrate" data from the hacked computers to an NSA relay station the size of a large suitcase, up to eight miles away.
Since the NSA uses radio waves, it can access the implants even when the computers are completely offline. Traditionally, common belief held that one of the most effective measures against Internet surveillance was to "air-gap" a computer containing sensitive information — or, in plain English, unplug the laptop or computer's Internet connection, isolating it from the outside world. But thanks to these tiny bugs, this protection method isn't foolproof anymore.
The technology is part of a program codenamed Quantum. The agency has used it to spy on Chinese hackers, Russian military networks, Mexican drug cartels and computers in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and India, as well as trade institutions inside the European Union, the New York Times reports.
Perhaps the report's biggest revelation is that Quantum inserts were used in the Stuxnet cyberattack against Iran’s nuclear facilities. This is the first time that a specific NSA program has been linked to the attack, which crippled Iranian's nuclear centrifuges, making them spin out of control. Previous reports indicated that the attackers used a thumb drive.

This is not the first time that details of the NSA Quantum program have been publicly exposed.
In November, a leaked NSA PowerPoint slide revealed that the agency had hacked 50,000 computers around the world. But anonymous officials told the Times that the number is actually closer to 100,000.
At the end of December, the German newsweekly Der Spiegel reported on a series of leaked documents exposing the NSA's most advanced hacking and spying techniques. Some of the slides published mentioned techniques similar to the ones described on Wednesday in the Times.
Jacob Appelbaum, a security researcher now working with Der Spiegel, mentioned Quantum implants in his talk at the hacking conference Chaos Communication Congress (see below for his full talk).

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Image: Mashable composite; iStockphoto, Baoshan