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Journalists Hacked with Suspected NSO Group iMessage ‘Zero-Click’ Exploit

citizenlab.ca

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Re: Journalists Hacked with Suspected NSO Group iMessage ‘Zero-Click’ Exploit

#121

Post by DSingularity »

goatsi wrote: post #107
ketamine__ wrote: post #71

It was awesome when Facebook deleted NSO group employees personal profiles. And then they whined about it. The silver lining of Facebook owning WhatsApp. I hope more organizations do this. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/10/faceb...

They didn't just whine, they sued Facebook in Israeli court (and won). Facebook was forced to reinstate their accounts: https://www.cyberscoop.com/facebook-nso-group-accounts-reins...

If Facebook was sincere, they could have held their ground. The Israeli government would then have to decide whether it was willing to ban a platform so widely used in their country or to simply fine them. Instead, FB decided to comply. Just a bunch of dead brown people — who cares?

Re: Journalists Hacked with Suspected NSO Group iMessage ‘Zero-Click’ Exploit

#122

Post by saagarjha »

ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #116
xkqd wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s more likely someone is unaware of your examples, because it requires a level of knowledge in corporate geopolitical actors that most people wouldn’t come across via normal news streams. Be polite.

I’ve seen too many of these comments over the years. They always come from the same hateful place. Once comments like that bubble up, it’s no longer a dialogue and the person writing them is not debating in good faith.

The guidelines tell you to assume good faith, and I think the commenter you’re replying to gave a fairly reasonable explanation of the intention behind what was written. For the most part, people don’t have a vendetta against Israel in particular: they are just unaware of other cases, or aren’t going to bring them up in an article about the NSO group, which is Israeli.

Re: Journalists Hacked with Suspected NSO Group iMessage ‘Zero-Click’ Exploit

#123

Post by coliveira »

yeahright256 wrote: post #98
pixl97 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The religious right has the whole 'second coming is happening in Israel' thing, so there is that.

The religious right can't even prevent Drag Queen Story Hour from happening, what makes you think they have this much power? It's more likely that it is simply the influence of Israelis and Jews in America, who are powerful enough to determine US foreign policy (Jared Kushner, as far as I can tell, is not a "religious right" but a zionist Jew).

They have a lot of power because nobody is opposing them in issues related to Israel. Because most people are ok with the status quo, fanatical christians pull their strings with large number of voters to support anything related to the state of Israel.

Re: Journalists Hacked with Suspected NSO Group iMessage ‘Zero-Click’ Exploit

#124

Post by quantummkv »

smashah wrote: post #46
pcbro141 wrote: post #37

America should stop giving aid to Israel as long as Israeli companies are going to assist in getting journalists arrested/murdered/dismembered.

WhatsApp "attempted" to get NSOs export license revoked and failed. How would you expect America to stop two of their allies from dealing with each other (with a potential courtship in the works)? Especially when America itself gets major weapons contracts to look the other way? This will just continue to get worse. More journalists and human rights activists will die because some delusional maniacs feelings were hur…

> Maybe tech as a whole should replace lip service and instead redirect (and/or reject) major funds to fight injustice on a geopolitical level.

So instead of a democratically elected US Govt dropping freedom from a 1 billion bomber on a 10$ tent, A bunch of hippies in a small part of the US should use the power of social media to control and direct conversation, culture and world events like some sort of a uber-exclusive shady techbro-illuminati?

The problem is genuine but any solution involving tech would only worsen the problem

Re: Journalists Hacked with Suspected NSO Group iMessage ‘Zero-Click’ Exploit

#125

Post by fortran77 »

ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #102
pcbro141 wrote: post #37

America should stop giving aid to Israel as long as Israeli companies are going to assist in getting journalists arrested/murdered/dismembered.

But it’s perfectly ok for European or American companies to do the same. Bull of France in Libya. Bluecoat in Syria. Siemens in iraq and Iran. Nokia in Bahrain. Cisco in China. ... The list is literally endless. Yet only Israeli companies are culpable in your mind and to such an extent that the entire state must be sanctioned. No less. Your hypocrisy is leaking.

NSO is owned by a UK based VC group.

Re: Journalists Hacked with Suspected NSO Group iMessage ‘Zero-Click’ Exploit

#126

Post by fortran77 »

ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #106
bjourne wrote: post #104

How come when we hear about this stuff it is always Israeli companies involved? Is ethics not taught in Israeli Computer Science curricula? Those who wrote this exploit are clearly "brilliant" and at least some of them are bound to be reading Hacker News. Is other countries' spyware firms just better at hiding their malware than Israel's is?

It’s called selection bias. It’s fun and always acceptable to hate on Israel. It’s also more memorable due to the sensationalization of it. A few years ago bluecoat systems was caught providing deep packet inspection gear to the Syrian government. But that wasn’t Israel so no biggie and you either never heard about it or didn’t pay much attention because it wasn’t Israel. American and European companies do this all t…

NSO is owned by a UK-based private equity group. It's not even an "Israeli" company.

Re: Journalists Hacked with Suspected NSO Group iMessage ‘Zero-Click’ Exploit

#127

Post by [deleted] »

darksaints wrote: post #42
pcbro141 wrote: post #37

America should stop giving aid to Israel as long as Israeli companies are going to assist in getting journalists arrested/murdered/dismembered.

We saw the news this year when a Saudi prince directly authorized the murder and dismemberment of an American/Saudi journalist inside it's own embassy. And literally nothing happened. I'm not holding my breath on America ever making the right decisions with respect to foreign policy.

[deleted]

Re: Journalists Hacked with Suspected NSO Group iMessage ‘Zero-Click’ Exploit

#128

Post by stevenjohns »

ipv6ipv4 wrote: post #106
bjourne wrote: post #104

How come when we hear about this stuff it is always Israeli companies involved? Is ethics not taught in Israeli Computer Science curricula? Those who wrote this exploit are clearly "brilliant" and at least some of them are bound to be reading Hacker News. Is other countries' spyware firms just better at hiding their malware than Israel's is?

It’s called selection bias. It’s fun and always acceptable to hate on Israel. It’s also more memorable due to the sensationalization of it. A few years ago bluecoat systems was caught providing deep packet inspection gear to the Syrian government. But that wasn’t Israel so no biggie and you either never heard about it or didn’t pay much attention because it wasn’t Israel. American and European companies do this all t…

I don't believe that happened the way you describe it. Blue Coat was illegally on-sold to Syria from a UAE-based distributor and that company received a 200% fine of the sale price.

Re: Journalists Hacked with Suspected NSO Group iMessage ‘Zero-Click’ Exploit

#129

Post by Mandatum »

JudasGoat wrote: post #63

As someone that isn't a developer, I wonder how many zero days come from people inside the software team. To simply have knowledge of a difficult bug that hasn't been resolved would seem to be valuable commodity in a closed source system.

This is why internal bug bounties should pay cash. Most orgs don't even have one.

Re: Journalists Hacked with Suspected NSO Group iMessage ‘Zero-Click’ Exploit

#130

Post by tolbish »

mandeepj wrote: post #48

If journalists start sharing Google Voice numbers instead of their iphone #s then would they be resilient to this sort of attacks?

I'm not sure Google Voice is all that secure. When I activated my Google Voice number I instantly had access to dozens of the previous account's voicemails. Some of them were rather private.
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