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NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
11–20 of 321 posts
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#12Sometimes you just feel like using Signal instead
Who's to say Signal will protect you any better against targeted remote-code-execution attacks from well-funded cyber mercenaries like NSO?
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#13The media and popular reaction to this seems really milquetoast compared to when Russia/China/North Korea/Iran do the same thing. How long before it becomes mainstream to treat Israel as a bogeyman?
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#14This seems like a disinformation campaign aimed at diverting attention from the fact that the governments of the human rights activists, human rights lawyers themselves used pegasus from NSO to target them.
Many of the Indian activists, journalists, lawyers who were targeted are working for low caste victims of false cases filed against them. John from Citizen Lab personally called them and told 'Your government attacked you'[0].
If anyone from Citizen Lab/WhatsApp is reading this, please corroborate with evidence that the governments themselves spied on its citizens when these activists sue them in court.
[0]: https://scroll.in/latest/942218/nagpur-lawyer-notified-by-wh...
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#15Dozens of tech companies around the world that were established in the last 4-5 years were done so entirely for the purpose of being fronts for spy agencies to engage in the vast collection of data.
This extends also to shipping, licensing, and auditing companies.
One example is https://www.pacificbasin.com/en/fleet/fleet.php
Somehow they’ve managed to assemble the worlds 2nd largest cargo fleet in terms of dry weight tonnage, all verifiable on https://marinetraffic.com btw, and yet they appear on NO LISTING ANYWHERE for the top 100 cargo companies.
That company is a front for the Chinese military, because if you do a reverse WHOIS search you will see http://pacbasin.com was also registered by the same organization...it is an autonomous drone hardware and extended flight operations firm. There is more to say there, but I will leave it at that.
Other firms that have been espionage operations since day one, or were acquired at some point and repurposed as spy outfits. This list includes both Western and Eastern powers:
NSFOCUS Global
psychz.net
mimecast.com
terra.net
protonmail.com
creditkarma.com
ipvm.com
ClearDDOS
Neuvector
Multacom
HighWinds
Black Oak Computers
IT7 Networks
Ramnode
Gorilla Servers
Digital Core
InMotion Hosting
Choopa
LeaseWeb
StackPath
Voxility
Perfect International
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#16Which is hilarious and hypocritical, since the government keeps talking about making end-to-end encryption apps illegal to distribute without backdoors. Now they're using an encryption app with a backdoor,* and they're upset about it? I thought this is what they wanted!
*I know, I know, this probably wasn't done with a backdoor -- it's just funnier to lie in this context.
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#17But I thought WhatsApp was end-to-end encrypted?
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#18Welcome, Signal
Also Keybase
And Telegram (need to enable e2e for a given conversation, though)
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#19The article claims that "a flaw in WhatsApp-owned servers" was used to "take over users’ phones".
This seems to imply that the hackers were able to escape from the WhatsApp mobile app to perform other actions on the phones.
How would this be possible?
Or is this just likely careless journalism, and the exploit was that the server breach allowed the attackers to exfiltrate WhatsApp data only?
Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies
#20Thats really funny because a friend of mine used to work there and always talked about how all the internal very classified communication was done via whatsapp!