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NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies

reuters.com

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Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies

#181

Post by edmundsauto »

lostcolony wrote: post #165
dan-robertson wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one assumes that WhatsApp are implementing the protocol as well as signal are (which I do), then I think there are three questions in deciding what is more secure: 1. Do you trust Facebook (or open whisper systems) with your metadata/expect them to delete it? 2. How likely are there to be bugs (in the app, not in the protocol itself) which lead to exploits. On the one hand WhatsApp probably have more people workin…

'On the one hand WhatsApp probably have more people working on the app' From a career in software development, I tend to feel that the more devs, the buggier. Maybe, MAYBE (number of QA)/(number of devs) = reliability coefficient.

The size of the red team could also be significantly larger. The more people you have looking for security holes the more likely to find them

Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies

#182

Post by golergka »

jonplackett wrote: post #104

What are Israel doing to get so good at this and chip design and weapons making and everything else they seem to be really good at? There’s only about 8 million people in the whole country. There are plenty of cities with more people than that. How come they punch so far above their weight?

Natural selection.

https://web.mit.edu/fustflum/documents/papers/AshkenaziIQ.jb...

Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies

#183

Post by democracy »

jonplackett wrote: post #104

What are Israel doing to get so good at this and chip design and weapons making and everything else they seem to be really good at? There’s only about 8 million people in the whole country. There are plenty of cities with more people than that. How come they punch so far above their weight?

I was told by a few people that their work culture is a sweatshop with "more work less bullshit" approach, is it true?

Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies

#184

Post by rapnie »

Anybody using Oversec? I am not using it, but the concept sounds good.

> Oversec constantly monitors the text on your screen. When it finds an encrypted text, it tries to decrypt it and then shows the decrypted text as an overlay in place of the encrypted text.

> In order to encrypt a text, Oversec shows a button next to an active input field. After having entered the secret text, tapping that button makes Oversec read the text, encrypt it and put back the encrypted text into the field. It is now ready to be sent in the subjacent app as usual - the app doesn't even know that it is sending encrypted data!

https://www.oversec.io/

Edit: Created a separate submission at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21414464

Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies

#185

Post by alfalfasprout »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #169
dan-robertson wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one assumes that WhatsApp are implementing the protocol as well as signal are (which I do), then I think there are three questions in deciding what is more secure: 1. Do you trust Facebook (or open whisper systems) with your metadata/expect them to delete it? 2. How likely are there to be bugs (in the app, not in the protocol itself) which lead to exploits. On the one hand WhatsApp probably have more people workin…

Even of they implement the Signal protocol, they have additional modifications to support ads, which increases the attack surface.

Well, and as pointed out elsewhere the signal protocol only covers messages in transit. How keys are managed, etc. also strongly affect security. In the signal app, the phones own the keys rather than another entity (hence why messages get rekeyed on whatsapp and why you're easily able to load messages on a new phone).

Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies

#186

Post by fmihaila »

fouric wrote: post #173
blotter_paper wrote: post #16

Which 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.

Hypocritical? How many of your personal secrets (or even your corporate secrets) would cause >= thousands of people to die or >= billions of taxpayer dollars to be lost if they were leaked?

> How many of your personal secrets (or even your corporate secrets) would cause >= thousands of people to die or >= billions of taxpayer dollars to be lost if they were leaked?

Personal means, and should continue to mean, something. I'm not willing to let governments define what is personal to me.

Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies

#187

Post by democracy »

colordrops wrote: post #141
dependenttypes wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I presume that most people will disagree with this but I believe that it is related to Jewish people on average being generally smarter than a non-jewish person. Consider for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Jewish_Nobel_laureates > "Nobel Prizes[note 1] have been awarded to over 900 individuals,[1] of whom at least 20% were Jews, although the Jewish population comprises less than 0.2% of the world's po…

Its a dangerous path - saying that one race is smarter directly implies that another race is dumber. That sort of dialogue is completely taboo at least in the US.

What about Obama's American exceptionalism speech? Seemed to be accepted fine.

Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies

#188

Post by opkr »

rshnotsecure wrote: post #15

Dozens 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 weigh…

The rise in shipping company fronts may potentially be attributed to miniature nuclear weapons payloads within shipping containers for rapid and unstoppable payload delivery at close proximity to enemy lines.

Btw intelligence agencies are using invisible image watermarking technologies to track users.

Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies

#189

Post by saagarjha »

lol768 wrote: post #96
chatmasta wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think OP is asking how NSO was able to escape the phone's sandbox model. To do that, they would need an exploit for the phone's OS, in addition to the WhatsApp exploit. So, the obvious question: which operating systems were specifically targeted? Another comment mentions Pegasus... that was an iOS exploit patched in 9.3.5 (3 years ago). Does that line up with the timeline of this article? Given that Android exploit…

>Given that Android exploits are far more common than iOS, I would expect they had one of those too. The Pixel was the only device that was not pwned in the 2017 Mobile Pwn2Own competition - the iPhone, running iOS 11.1, was exploited 4 times via both WiFi and Safari. I'd be incredinly surprised if NSO were able to compromise an up to date Pixel phone.

That by itself doesn’t mean much; very few people use Pixel devices and there’s significantly less attention put on it.

Re: NSO hacked WhatsApp to spy on top government officials at U.S. allies

#190

Post by tialaramex »

nullc wrote: post #121
jonplackett wrote: post #104

What are Israel doing to get so good at this and chip design and weapons making and everything else they seem to be really good at? There’s only about 8 million people in the whole country. There are plenty of cities with more people than that. How come they punch so far above their weight?

My experience with Israeli companies suggests that a culture which values intellectual achievement and competition is more widespread there. Similar cultural enclaves exist elsewhere in the world and are presumably similarly effective, but they just aren't as large a portion of the population. Even small cultural differences can have outsized effects because of pollination-- e.g. it's easier to learn from an expert i…

Also humans self-segregate. All else being equal a human who has property A will prefer to live with other humans who have property A, rather than humans with property B. Skin colour, favourite icecream flavour, late risers versus early birds - anything. We can deliberately make adjustments at policy level to reduce the harmful consequences (or of course, we can do stuff like red-lining to make it worse) but that's what they naturally do.

So these cultural affects will snowball.

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