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WhatsApp security breach may have targeted human rights groups
- devoply 7y agoHow about putting pressure on Israel to shut down all these companies looking to supply dictators with tools of oppression?
- sudoaza 7y agoMaybe blackwater offers to help there...
- nyolfen 7y agonso is already being sued in israeli court by some of the more sympathetic victims
- _jal 7y agoI'm sure our betters will get right on that, right after they tighten up international money laundering from bad actors. Sorry, I'll stop laughing eventually.
- CodeSheikh 7y agoThese "extra-curricular" activities of Israeli govt's involvement with rogue entities cast a bad shadow on the tech culture of Israel. Something not good for brooding startups coming out of Tel Aviv.
- Udik 7y agoThe curricular activities of the Israeli government, democratically elected, include building illegal settlements in occupied territories, annexing territory in violation of international agreements, shooting unarmed civilians protesting inside their own borders.
- vb6lives 7y agoNever gonna happen. The bulk of their business comes from the "good" guys
- ionised 7y agoThere's no political will to do this unfortunately.
- themackhesback 7y agoFrom where could such pressure arise? There is a bipartisan consensus in the United States supporting Israel’s ongoing establishment of an ethnically pure police state. If there is no serious opposition to that, there will certainly be no serious opposition to this kind of thing.
- King-Aaron 7y agoOh, I don't think that's how it works when it comes to Israel doing terrible things.
- masklinn 7y agoThat'd be the case pretty much any time NSO is implicated. Amnesty had a bit on that back last year[0]. Despite some mealy-mouthed denials, folks have been noting NSO certainly doesn't mind selling their wares to human rights abusers for years[1][2] and earlier this year NSO's founder pretty much came out defending spyware and hacking of journalists, human rights activists and lawyers, etc…[3] [0] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/08/is-nso-group-a-goto-company-for-human-rights-abusers/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/08/is-nso-group-... [1] https://citizenlab.org/2016/08/million-dollar-dissident-iphone-zero-day-nso-group-uae/ https://citizenlab.org/2016/08/million-dollar-dissident-ipho... [2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/world/americas/mexico-spyware-anticrime.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/world/americas/mexico-spy... [3] https://freedom.press/news/spyware-vendor-defends-hacking-journalists-continues-embolden-abusive-governments/ https://freedom.press/news/spyware-vendor-defends-hacking-jo...
- cronix 7y agoMore: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/interview-with-ceo-of-nso-group-israeli-spyware-maker-on-fighting-terror-khashoggi-murder-and-saudi-arabia-60-minutes/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/interview-with-ceo-of-nso-group...
- JumpCrisscross 7y ago> Despite some mealy-mouthed denials, folks have been noting NSO certainly doesn't mind selling their wares to human rights abusers for years Is there any political push in the U.S. to, if not hold the NSO Group's executives and key engineers responsible, at least make their lives difficult? (For example, through the Global Magnitsky Act [1].) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitsky_Act#Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnitsky_Act#Law
- AsyncAwait 7y ago> is there any political push in the U.S. to, if not hold the NSO Group's executives and key engineers responsible, at least make their lives difficult? (For example, through the Global Magnitsky Act) NSO is Israeli. The U.S. has proven that it does not care about illegal acts of its friends, not in Israel, nor Egypt, KSA etc. Granted, NSO Group is a private entity, but it definitely has the Israeli government looking the other way and so will do the U.S. one as a result. The Magnitsky act was targeted at Russia, there's political will for that. Using it to target Israeli actors? I don't think so. P.S. Before downvoting because I criticized something Israeli, note that it is such mentality that helps players like NSO to operate with impunity in the first place. Nonetheless, I want to make clear that there are U.S. & European companies, (for example Italian-based, "Hacking Team", that do this and it's just as bankrupt). It is the business model that is bankrupt.
- o10449366 7y agoGoogle left China nearly a decade ago in part because it suspected Chinese government operatives of hacking their systems to target human rights activists. If they double down on their commitment and re-enter China I can only see it as an inevitability that the same thing will happen again.
- vorpalhex 7y agoOr they've simply decided it's more profitable to directly sell to China and save them the effort of hacking in.
- magwa101 7y agoLet me guess, "sophisticated attack vector", "state level actor"...now who would be against human rights?
- beiller 7y agoDo you think it was aliens?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- MagicPropmaker 7y ago_may have_. Those are weasel words. Why demonize a nation and a group of people because of Apple's buggy operating system that's falsely marketed as "Secure by design?"
- permatech 7y agoWhat does WhatsApp have to do with Apple? Sounds like using iPhone's internal messaging app would have been safer than WhatsApp on Android.
- dontbenebby 7y agoSignal was not affected either, is cross platform, and has a lot of eyeballs on its source
- miohtama 7y agoMobile apps, both iOS and Android, are sandboxed. Effectively one should be not able to root and install malware just by exploiting an user mode app. However, in this case, looks like it might have been chained with a iOS kernel exploit - a bad memcpy is suspected. So we should blame unsafe programming languages and C culture once again.
- yzssi 7y agohttps://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fpics.onsizzle.com%2Fthe-goyim-know-shut-it-down-memecrunch-com-5209883.png&f=1 https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fpics.onsizz...
- ETHisso2017 7y agoAll, here is the investment fund that owns NSO. While they're based in Europe, their LPs are in the US - might be worth shooting them a letter. https://www.pionline.com/article/20190328/ONLINE/190329893/novalpina-capital-partners-closes-inaugural-fund-at-11-billion https://www.pionline.com/article/20190328/ONLINE/190329893/n...
- cascom 7y agoI’m sure Oregon’s public employees will be thrilled to here how companies like this are part of their pension’s investment portfolio
- ETHisso2017 7y agoHere is the Oregon Public Employees' Retirement Fund contact page. It has their upcoming schedule of board meetings as well as an email address for submitting written testimony. Would be good if they could explore divesting themselves from Novalpina or encouraging Novalpina to divest NSO. https://www.oregon.gov/pers/Pages/Board/PERS-Board-Information.aspx https://www.oregon.gov/pers/Pages/Board/PERS-Board-Informati... Board email: PERS.Board@state.or.us
- llamataboot 7y agoNSO is former Israeli intelligence. Much like the gross rich former USMil mercenaries here (Blackwater/Xe) etc these people tend to be pretty well-connected. No way they will be held accountable - and one could argue that both the US and Israel benefit from having more of their dirty work done under the guise of mercenaries.
- annolir 7y agoAren't NSOs employees as liable as Raytheon, Boeing and Dassault's employees (that is - not at all)? A company is an organism whose goal is to maximize shareholder value - you can't really blame its executives for doing that. At the end of the day, these companies operate within the confines of the laws - and both the US and Israel have export regulations which clarify what's right and wrong. Isn't that really the issue?
- llamataboot 7y agoAll those employees are liable as well. So are google engineers, facebook engineers, etc. It may well be the reality that corporations are legal entities set up to externalize every cost, internalize every profit, and sink a healthy amount of them back into rewriting the laws that would constrain such behavior and we all have to live with the results. But that doesn't mean it's ethical. If you write code that you know is going to be used by an authoritarian state to kill human rights activists and you can currently shrug and say, well it's legal and it pays well, then well more power to you I suppose. But I'm not going to say that you aren't liable from /my/ perspective.
- dontbenebby 7y agoSo as a practical matter, what can someone who works for a humans rights group do with this information? Falling back to a dumbphone will send your calls and texts in the clear. (Plus even dumb phones have firmware which can be hacked). The big takeaway I see is to be vigilant about OS/app updates and get them propagated as quickly as possible... but people often put apps like Whatsapp or Signal on their personal devices, which IT has no control over...
- breatheoften 7y agoHas the EFF ever been publicly targeted by proficient hacking entity before? If anyone is capable of describing the appropriate response to this kind of threat — it has to be them.
- acct1771 7y agoWant a security starter pack? | Surveillance Self-Defense https://ssd.eff.org/en/playlist/want-security-starter-pack https://ssd.eff.org/en/playlist/want-security-starter-pack https://www.eff.org/issues/security https://www.eff.org/issues/security https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/your-security-plan https://ssd.eff.org/en/module/your-security-plan Links from (E)lectronic (F)rontier (F)oundation. Should point someone in the right direction.
- dontbenebby 7y ago>If anyone is capable of describing the appropriate response to this kind of threat — it has to be them. I'd be willing to bet any competent actor would realize trying to use something on EFF would probably result in their staff noticing their computer acting oddly and passing along the malware sample to a place like Citizen Lab. Then they can wave bye bye to their zero day. I don't have a source but I could have sworn some leaked doc at some point mentioned they (various intel agencies) don't like to use fancy 0 days on savvy targets. Probably something that's used on places that want to Free Tibet or let Saudi women drive, not savvy tech people. I also think EFF probably practice what they preach (another poster mentioned their great surveillance self defense guide). There's also lot to be said for just leaving your phones in the other room, turning on the radio, then having a meeting in a conference room free of electronics. People often focus too much on infosec, instead of opsec IMHO.