Apr 12 2024

Apple Boosts Spyware Alerts For Mercenary Attacks

Category: Spyware — disc7 @ 7:09 am
https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/news/apple-boosts-spyware-alerts/

Apple has updated its documentation related to its warning system for mercenary spyware threats, now specifying that it alerts users when they may have been individually targeted by such attacks.

The revision points out companies like NSO Group, known for developing surveillance tools like Pegasus, which state actors often use for targeted attacks on individuals such as journalists, activists, politicians and diplomats. 

In a blog post published on Wednesday, Apple highlighted the global and sophisticated nature of these attacks, which are costly and complex.

The update marks a shift in the wording from informing and assisting users targeted by state-sponsored attackers to specifically addressing mercenary spyware threats.

“It’s really important to recognize that mercenary spyware, unlike others, is deliberately designed with advanced capabilities, including zero-day exploits, complex obfuscation techniques, and self-destruct mechanisms, making it highly effective and hard to detect,” explained Krishna Vishnubhotla, vice president of product strategy at Zimperium.

According to recent reports, Apple sent threat notifications to iPhone users in 92 countries, coinciding with the support page revision.

While Apple began sending threat notifications in November 2021, it refrained from attributing the attacks or notifications to any particular threat actor or region. 

This development now aligns with global efforts to counter the misuse of commercial spyware, as evidenced by a coalition of countries, including the US, working to develop safeguards against invasive surveillance technology.

Moreover, a recent report by Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and Mandiant shed light on the exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities in 2023, with commercial surveillance vendors being responsible for a significant portion of these exploits. 

These vulnerabilities targeted web browsers and mobile devices, underscoring the increasing reliance of threat actors on zero days for evasion and persistence.

Mobile Phone Spyware: …the hidden threat to any smartphone

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Tags: mercenary spyware, NSO, Pegasus

Jan 29 2022

The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon

Category: Cyberweapon,Spyware — DISC @ 11:49 am

A Times investigation reveals how Israel reaped diplomatic gains around the world from NSO’s Pegasus spyware — a tool America itself purchased but is now trying to ban.

In June 2019, three Israeli computer engineers arrived at a New Jersey building used by the F.B.I. They unpacked dozens of computer servers, arranging them on tall racks in an isolated room. As they set up the equipment, the engineers made a series of calls to their bosses in Herzliya, a Tel Aviv suburb, at the headquarters for NSO Group, the world’s most notorious maker of spyware. Then, with their equipment in place, they began testing.

The F.B.I. had bought a version of Pegasus, NSO’s premier spying tool. For nearly a decade, the Israeli firm had been selling its surveillance software on a subscription basis to law-enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world, promising that it could do what no one else — not a private company, not even a state intelligence service — could do: consistently and reliably crack the encrypted communications of any iPhone or Android smartphone.

Since NSO had introduced Pegasus to the global market in 2011, it had helped Mexican authorities capture Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo. European investigators have quietly used Pegasus to thwart terrorist plots, fight organized crime and, in one case, take down a global child-abuse ring, identifying dozens of suspects in more than 40 countries. In a broader sense, NSO’s products seemed to solve one of the biggest problems facing law-enforcement and intelligence agencies in the 21st century: that criminals and terrorists had better technology for encrypting their communications than investigators had to decrypt them. The criminal world had gone dark even as it was increasingly going global.

But by the time the company’s engineers walked through the door of the New Jersey facility in 2019, the many abuses of Pegasus had also been well documented. Mexico deployed the software not just against gangsters but also against journalists and political dissidents. The United Arab Emirates used the software to hack the phone of a civil rights activist whom the government threw in jail. Saudi Arabia used it against women’s rights activists and, according to a lawsuit filed by a Saudi dissident, to spy on communications with Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, whom Saudi operatives killed and dismembered in Istanbul in 2018.

The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon

The World’s Most Terrifying Spyware

Pegasus Spyware – ‘A Privacy Killer’

Finland says it found NSO’s Pegasus spyware on diplomats’ phones

Tags: cyberweapons, diplomats’ phones, Finland, NSO, NSO Group, Pegasus spyware, Pegasus Spyware - 'A Privacy Killer'