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The US is now the largest investor in commercial spyware
- RianAtheer 1y ago[flagged]
- OutOfHere 1y ago[flagged]
- SilverElfin 1y agoWhat about China? Salt typhoon was just one among many actual attacks, not just threats, connected back to the Chinese state.
- OutOfHere 1y agoYes, but with rare exceptions, China doesn't exercise much power to lock up someone, or to disempower someone, at least so long as you don't visit China. Meanwhile, the US and Israel are well known to target individuals both domestically and around the world irrespective of their affiliation.
- ImJamal 1y agoThey have the power to arrest people in China. Any Chinese outside of China could have their family still in China arrested.
- SilverElfin 1y agoWhat is power? Like legally? China definitely has international policing outposts that are meant to cast their power outside their borders. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/12/world/europe/china-outpost-new-york.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/12/world/europe/china-outpos...
- hirvi74 1y ago> China doesn't exercise much power to lock up someone, or to disempower someone, at least so long as you don't visit China. I am not certain that is necessarily true. At least, not if one is originally from China. https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/trnsprnc/brfng-mtrls/prlmntry-bndrs/20240719/43-en.aspx https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/trnsprnc/brfng-mtrls/prlm...
- lmz 1y agoTelling someone their family is going to get it if they keep doing what they do is quite some distance away from... straight up bombing them.
- pessimizer 1y agoAnd anybody who happens to be nearby.
- corimaith 1y agoAnd you think China won't bomb foreign adversaries if they can? Or any country for that matter. The answer is don't place yourself in the crosshairs of great powers in the first place, which then puts into the degree you can align yourself with their interests.
- hirvi74 1y agoI am not sure I am following you. Who are you implying are the bombers and during what time period? As for China not bombing anyone, while true, I believe it's merely a matter of time. While I hope I am wrong, Taiwan seems awfully worried to be located about 80 miles away from their peaceful and loving neighbor for some reason.
- pessimizer 1y agoIt's also important to keep in mind that China has less than a quarter of the per capita prison population as the US. If you're talking about who's a police state, the US and China just aren't in the same universe. Or from another direction, China has 4x the population of the US, and still has fewer people in prison.
- soperj 1y agoWhat attacks from the US have you heard of?
- autoexec 1y agoDoes microsoft windows count? Honestly, I imagine that other nations should be very concerned about the small number of US based companies creating all the CPUs which could easily be backdoored. Same for the blackbox wireless chipsets our phones depend on too. That and so many of the companies that people depend on are in the US (Google, Amazon, social media, Apple, MS, etc) since you have to think that the US government is collecting massive amounts of data from those places.
- saagarjha 1y agoStuxnet?
- corimaith 1y agoAccording to https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-04-10-world-first-cybercrime-index-ranks-countries-cybercrime-threat-level https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-04-10-world-first-cybercrime-..., Russia (58), Ukraine (36), China (27) and then USA (25) top the list, with Israel (2.51) at a measly rank 16. So no, and I'm not sure why OP decided to single out Israel here given it is a order of magnitude less than the others and there are so many other nations, unless if they have a specific agenda to push here.
- linkregister 1y agoInvestment in these firms does not equate to improved national security. Existing US government programs exceed the capabilities of these firms. A purpose for contracting with these firms is to evade the significant legal oversight present in the NSA, CIA, and FBI computer network exploitation programs.
- esalman 1y agoThe former number one, and current number two, is anyone's guess. My home country does not have formal diplomatic ties with them, yet we purchased and deployed surveillance tech from this country. We live in a truly dystopian nightmare.
- hparadiz 1y agoAka enterprise security solutions
- evanjrowley 1y agoThis is a big step beyond just enterprise EDR/MDM
- OutOfHere 1y agoHacking personal devices goes way beyond enterprise security. It is cybercriminal behavior.
- tptacek 1y agoEnterprises are generally not customers of serious CNE vendors.
- ta12653421 1y agoCloud-based Enterprise Security Solution, thats important! ;-)
- reactordev 1y agoCentralized, Single-pane-of-glass, Cloud-based Enterprise Security Solution.
- ta12653421 1y ago...is there an option that you add Blockchain somehow? :-D
- reactordev 1y agoCharlie, I think we have our audit-log solution…
- OutOfHere 1y agoI see multiple ex-employers listed at https://staging--atlantic-council-spyware.netlify.app/ https://staging--atlantic-council-spyware.netlify.app/ | https://mythicalbeasts.dfrlab.org/ https://mythicalbeasts.dfrlab.org/. I strongly advise avoiding all prospective employers that use these services as they're practically guaranteed to hack your phone. Report: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/mythical-beasts-and-where-to-find-them-mapping-the-global-spyware-market-and-its-threats-to-national-security-and-human-rights/ https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/re... Dataset: https://github.com/ac-csi/mythical-beasts https://github.com/ac-csi/mythical-beasts
- dadrian 1y agoIt is illegal for an employer to hack your phone.
- OutOfHere 1y agoIt is why the employer contracts the hacking firm to do it all for them. Meanwhile, the employer has deniability. The employer receives reports of your data and activities as accessed by the firm. That is the whole point. It's a legal gray area. Being naive about it doesn't help.
- Group_B 1y agoGotta love the good old US of A. I feel like we have the worst of both worlds; dystopian surveillance, yet massive crime issues still. An amazing world we live in.
- kubb 1y agoAt least you have freedom… in some sense.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- decremental 1y ago[dead]
- generalizations 1y agoI suspect that in the very near future, the latter will dramatically decrease and the former dramatically increase. I wonder how that tradeoff will be perceived.
- jrochkind1 1y agoDon't worry, the crime wont' actually decrease either.
- falcor84 1y agoWhat do you mean? What would lead to government surveillance decreasing?
- bamboozled 1y ago“Freedomware”
- tptacek 1y agoThis data set is missing even several pretty well-known CNE vendors. The bigger question is: why would you expect the US not to be the largest investor? CNE vendors are tech companies. The US is the largest investor in tech companies.
- bigyabai 1y ago> why would you expect the US not to be the largest investor? Mostly because $FAV_TECH_COMPANY constantly tells me they love privacy. They fight backdoors in court, they rush out security patches and closely coordinate with the government to ensure I'm safe. Every advertisement seems to reinforce the idea that they cared about my security, I guess I put too much faith in the principles of private enterprise.
- tptacek 1y agoWhat would that have to do with anything I just said?
- bigyabai 1y agoIt might help inform you, if you're unfamiliar with the sentiment Americans hold towards security? Don't take my word for it, though. Scroll through the rest of the comments in this thread, I counted all of three unique users that took this article at face-value. The fact that we see this cognitive dissonance on HN should really reinforce how unimportant online security is to Silicon Valley.
- simoncion 1y ago> What would that have to do with anything I just said? It's a direct answer to the question you posed, which was email-quoted in the first line of the comment. It relates the point of view of someone who's substantially tech-ignorant and -in part because they simply don't have time or energy to think much on the topic- entirely unaware of how the intelligence and infosec world works. People like that make up a somewhat-surprising fraction of the US population. Sometimes folks who work in computers are a member of this subset of the population!
- howmayiannoyyou 1y agoGood. I want my tax dollars allocated to penetrating every and any system my country's adversaries may use to undermine our interests or threaten our people. And, I want maximum penalties, civil and criminal, for any person or company who misuses these systems for personal or political gain. Also, I'd like to see mandatory statutory civil damages for any vendor creating and/or selling/providing these systems who does so in a negligent or malicious manner, same as we provide for other high risk products and services.
- vkou 1y agoWell, you're definitely not going to get the latter two, and the only guarantee about the first one is that they will definitely be used against enemies of the state. Whether there's any overlap between them and enemies of the people will heavily depend on the latter's ability to steer towards good governance. The track record for the past few decades hasn't been great.
- ChainnChompp 1y agoNailed it - well said. Going to take some serious work for the populace to start steering the ship again, unfortunately.
- mensetmanusman 1y agoGoogle and FB are commercial spyware.
- reactordev 1y agoMicrosoft Teams and O365 suite are as well.
- dadrian 1y agoThis is an unserious article. 1) If you're counting investment, you should count it in dollars, not number of investors or corporate entity locations. 2) This is missing at least two extremely well-known CNE vendors, which makes me doubt its accuracy. 3) The takeaway from the graph on Mythical Beasts [1] should be that the industry is _very small_, not that it's very big. 4) Americans should be happy that the US government is the biggest player. Would you prefer to have China or Russia or the Middle East be the biggest player? Get a warrant -> own a phone is a very straightforward process that fits into existing models of civil liberties in the US. [1]: https://mythicalbeasts.atlanticcouncil.org/ https://mythicalbeasts.atlanticcouncil.org/
- dogleash 1y ago>Would you prefer to have China or Russia or the Middle East be the biggest player? If the absolute value of China + Russia + ME was the same, but US went down? Yeah, probably. Doubly so if sales going down meant less R&D investment and therefore lower quality software.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tptacek 1y agoIt also assumes we'd have records of investments outside the US/EU market to begin with.
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y ago"Would you prefer to have China or Russia or the Middle East be the biggest player?" To be fair, an objective person might prefer to have _no_ "big players" Whether a biased or self-interested commenter on the subject believes this is possible or not doesn't eliminate the possibilty of this preference It is like asking whether a voter would prefer to have the "biggest players" giving funds to X candidate or Y candidate, ignoring whether the voter would actually prefer campaign finance reform instead
- halJordan 1y ago
- nycdatasci 1y agoYou can find a graph showing the relationships between investors and entities here: https://staging--atlantic-council-spyware.netlify.app/ https://staging--atlantic-council-spyware.netlify.app/ The headline can't be taken at face value. "Largest" is based on the number of investing entities (including individuals), not something more objective like dollars invested. Also, the US is not making these decisions as the headline implies.
- cramcgrab 1y agoAccording to ars.