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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

#201

Post by inglor »

milofeynman wrote: post #9

The article doesn't really say what hackers had access to, but it sounds like they had full control over their phones. There is a lot bigger story here and I'd love to read a post-mortem in a few months. Also, WhatsApp is such an obvious target for a state actor. I saw several articles of the last year that mentioned Jared Kushner using Whatsapp so I assume a lot of government folks use it for off the books "encrypte…

NSO still have multiple ubpatched 0 days in WhatsApp Telegram and most other messaging apps.

Your best bet is to use something obscure so you cannot easily be targeted or not being connected to the same net.

At the Israeli army we had phones that ran completely separate software stacks and talked to a different network for this. Nothing was on the internet.

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

#203

Post by inglor »

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?

The Israeli army makes you code 12 hours a day for a year in some training programs.

Our punch is above our weight because of hard work and skepticism.

That's not the terrible stuff like NSO. NSO is just a clever way for the government (and the US government - don't forget) to export the military technology, regulate it and then claim they did not do it but a private company did.

Virtually everyone in NSO was in 8200, this is a way for the US and its allies to get around military trade issues.

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

#204

Post by inglor »

3pt14159 wrote: post #92
denzil_correa wrote: post #7

> Sources familiar with WhatsApp’s internal investigation into the breach said a “significant” portion of the known victims are high-profile government and military officials spread across at least 20 countries on five continents. Welp!

I know a military contractor working on stuff for non-Nato airforces. These guys use WattsApp for everything. It blew my mind.

Fun fact, a few of my friends and even family work for NSO and until recently they used WhatsApp for their own internal communication.

They literally moved off it a few days ago when shit hit the fan into more secure software because Facebook is targeting NSO employees.

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

#205

Post by beagle3 »

buboard wrote: post #68
feelthepress wrote: post #64

Earlier this month the DOJ asked Facebook to "halt end-to-end encryption" by adding a backdoor to all of Facebook's apps. Perhaps this is a reason. https://www.engadget.com/2019/10/03/doj-facebook-end-to-end-...

I m confused, the top government officials are the children or the predators?

The answer is yes.

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

#206

Post by JohnFen »

wp381640 wrote: post #158
JohnFen wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many people actually worry about these spy agencies? I don't really worry about the spy agencies themselves -- I am not of any interest to them. However, I worry a lot about the likes of NSO and the tools they produce. They are likely to end up being used, in one form or another, by criminals and corporations.

These tools keep authoritarians in power and indirectly impact hundres of millions of people. It's like saying you don't care about pacific ocean plastic because you live on the east coast.

> These tools keep authoritarians in power

Indeed. I think I covered that in "criminal" category, but perhaps I should have been more explicit.

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

#207

Post by inglor »

I am just confused that NSO are getting all the flak for this when there are many bigger players in the market (like Verint) peacefully happily doing the same thing for years.

Of course, I don't think this particular report is correct (I am sure the US spies on its allies like all big countries but I doubt it would need NSO and given the US regulates the body that regulates who NSO is allowed to sell to - I doubt it)

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

#208

Post by friendlybus »

avocado4 wrote: post #127
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?

Jews are extremely overrepresented amongst scientific, business, cultural, and political elites compared to how many of them are in the world. Just look at the list of 500 richest people, or Nobel Prize winners. I took a class on it back in the day in the uni. There are long and complicated historical factors contributing to this, including centuries of Catholic-church mandated Jewish monopoly on law & banking (i.e.…

> On top of that, everybody has been trying to murder Jews during the entire history, so there's a lot of natural selection.

It doesn't seem plausible that war or murder leads to a positive force on someone's character or natural ability. There are many great tragedies where the flower of a nation's manhood has been lost in war and left the country in a worse off position to grow it's populace. The Battle of the Somme for one.

Most religions and ethnic groups has at least one persecution story if not centuries of them, I don't see the evidence that it leads to a uniform positive increase in outcomes.

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

#209

Post by rshnotsecure »

opkr wrote: post #188
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.

Can we talk? One concern we had was that these cargo ships, some subset of the 220, have nuclear weapons onboard that the crew isn’t even aware of. Much like how the soviets used to hide their ICBMs in train cars that move around, this makes tracking these things really hard.

[email address redacted]

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