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U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware

reuters.com

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Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware

#4

“ NSO says its intrusion system cannot work on phones with U.S. numbers beginning with the country code +1.” Seems like they just need to add a similar patch for apple ids for emails ending in “state.gov”. Not sure why this is such a big deal.

Come on, think about it. Doesn't work for phone numbers starting with +1? So, anyone who buys the right sim card is immune? A team of professional hackers can't find the if-else in the attack binary that enforces that to disable it? They're selling software to cybersecurity teams on the assumption that they can't crack it?

Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware

#8

“ NSO says its intrusion system cannot work on phones with U.S. numbers beginning with the country code +1.” Seems like they just need to add a similar patch for apple ids for emails ending in “state.gov”. Not sure why this is such a big deal.

Come on, think about it. Doesn't work for phone numbers starting with +1? So, anyone who buys the right sim card is immune? A team of professional hackers can't find the if-else in the attack binary that enforces that to disable it? They're selling software to cybersecurity teams on the assumption that they can't crack it?

My understanding is that it's not _just_ a tool, but a whole infrastructure around it that the clients use. So presumably, before deploying to a target, it would need to go through NSO infrastructure, so they could vet there.

Re: U.S. State Department phones hacked with Israeli company spyware

#10
>In a public response, NSO has said its technology helps stop terrorism and that they've installed controls to curb spying against innocent targets. For example, NSO says its intrusion system cannot work on phones with U.S. numbers beginning with the country code +1.

So the point is to stop terrorism and to do that they've immediately ruled that all Americans aren't terrorists. That doesn't seem like a good metric of determining if someone is a terrorist, and makes me doubt their other controls are any better.

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