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Given the depth of China's interest in controlling and accessing dissidents worldwide, I would think it highly likely that China is behind the entire exploit. What I did not see in the articles (too many to read everything) is the requirement to inject the implant from a website. Did the article indicate what sites were compromised?
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/03/apple-privacy... Campaign targets Apple over privacy betrayal for Chinese ...
The list of apps being monitored which are hardcoded directly in the implant[1] include : com.yahoo.Aerogram com.microsoft.Office.Outlook com.netease.mailmaster com.rebelvox.voxer-lite com.viber com.google.Gmail ph.telegra.Telegraph com.tencent.qqmail com.atebits.Tweetie2 net.whatsapp.WhatsApp com.skype.skype com.facebook.Facebook com.tencent.xin [1] https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2019/08/implant-teard...
This is an odd list. Some big messaging apps like Signal and Line are notably missing, while tools like Mail Master and Voxer seem like pretty minor players compared to the rest. Is there a particular region of the world or community where this specific list makes most sense?
These are fascinating. It would be very interesting to know what the character and subject matter of the infecting sites were. Outside of the great tech writeup, what is particularly interesting about this, to me, from a geopolitical perspective is the level of restraint. The malicious actors in this case leveraged zero-days for iOS for years and yet do not seem to have overextended themselves or risk exposure by ove…
> leveraged zero-days for iOS for years Isn't that a problem with the iOS walled garden, not even security researchers can properly investigate users devices and detect infections like this, like they can with desktop operating systems...?
See: CVE-2019-1162
See: CVE-2017-6074
I wonder what happens when Apple distribute the update and it detects this is on your phone. Do they even notify you?
Given the depth of China's interest in controlling and accessing dissidents worldwide, I would think it highly likely that China is behind the entire exploit. What I did not see in the articles (too many to read everything) is the requirement to inject the implant from a website. Did the article indicate what sites were compromised?
Nope. But given that the write-up talks about victims being victims merely for being in a geographical region makes me immediately think about wifi portals, and ISP/telecom-injection via DNS hijacking. We already know that ISPs routinely hijack your DNS queries to snarf your search queries, inject ads, redirect you to cached versions of big sites to “speed up your experience”, warn you of virus infection, etc etc. It…
I'm not a sophisticated state actor, but I were going to try to deliver a message to a group of people, I'd use ad networks to target the geography or population that I was interested in. A bad actor could easily get a shitty ad network to deliver all sorts of payloads.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hopefully a popularity surge will translate into the app getting better. It's notably less pleasant to use than Telegram, which I'd think of as its closest competitor.
Given that Telegram uses an entirely different encryption scheme, and does not e2e encrypt by default, I'd consider Wire (using some variation of the Signal protocol) the closest competitor. And Wire is rather pleasant to use, with clients on many platforms, sign-up with phone number or email, encrypted voice chat, encrypted group chats, etc.
As a side note: given all the security resources Google has, why Android is still not considered safer than iOS? What mistakes has Google made with Android, and how could they be fixed?
The downside of Android being an open platform is that Google is limited in forcing vendors to update their devices - and most do not. That said, Android has had regular monthly security releases for years, and the Pixel devices are excellent from a security perspective. Google also monitors its app store - as well as the full Android ecosystem (as far as Google Play Services is installed) for potentially harmful applications. This is why you regularly see articles along the lines of "Google removes malware from the Play Store that has had X installs!"
I'd say the biggest vulnerability for Android users given its impressive scale is a vulnerability in a vendor's supply chain. Given the complexity of devices, a vendor likely has multiple places where a malicious actor could insert malware into an Android device. I think this is why US intel has ultimately decided devices from China - Huawei in particular - are untrustworthy. If you can't validate every component of a device and trust the vendor will always audit its security, then it's hard to trust a device, even if it is safe right now.
I wonder what happens when Apple distribute the update and it detects this is on your phone. Do they even notify you?
IANAL but shouldn’t this be a requirement within the GDPR? As a data operator, an organisation has the obligation to disclose any loss/leak of data, so this should be enforced.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've recently seen a surge of non-nerd Signal users. Mostly random people from my contacts starting to use it.
Hopefully a popularity surge will translate into the app getting better. It's notably less pleasant to use than Telegram, which I'd think of as its closest competitor.