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

reuters.com

161–170 of 651 posts

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

#161

Is there a timetable when Apple plans to stop using memory-unsafe languages to avoid memory-bugs? If not, how can the amount of zero-days stop with constant development?

biggest issue here isn't memory safety but the dumpster fire of imessage format that calls out to privileged parts of the system

And Apple's terrible software and QA processes, like lack of CI or fuzzing, which is why Google Project Zero is discovering flaws for them.

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

#162

“ 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.

Presumably those phones had Ugandan numbers.

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

#163
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Israel is ostensibly a Western ally, yet they sell weapons that are used to attack Western nations and their citizens. Can you see why some people might consider that a problem? Your accusations of anti-semitism are unwelcome and without merit.

There are also numerous instances of their intelligence forces spying on us, an ally. - https://apnews.com/article/israel-jonathan-pollard-espionage... - https://www.politico.com/story/2019/09/12/israel-white-house...

Everyone spies on everyone, no one is actually shocked by that. The US does it too (see the interception of Angela Merkel's phone calls...)

The key is you don't get caught doing it, because it removes plausible deniability.

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

#165

Seems like not-the-smartest move for Israel to mess with one of the few powerful entities that desires its continued existence

This is just another incident in a long list that goes back decades of Israel getting carte blanche to do whatever they want to the US with little to no repercussion. The most famous probably being USS Liberty ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident )

Why would Israel be allowed to do whatever they want?

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

#166
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The US provides substantial financial, military, and political aid to Israel, that it does not provide to Germany.

There are currently around 35000 American service members deployed to Germany.

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

#167

>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…

Funny enough this reminds me of the ransomware that doesn't work if a cyrillic keyboard is installed. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2021/05/try-this-one-weird-trick...

If you are a Russian hacker, you probably don't want to piss off a Russian mobster who has the capability to take you out, and the contacts within Russian intelligence to identify you.

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

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that the US actively engages in military operations in defense of Israel, I would say that it not reasonable to attribute a larger share of the spending to Germany rather than Israel?

What military operations would those be?

Stuxnet and the intervention in Syria just off the top of my head.

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

#169

Arguably, this is the real use case Pegasus was designed for. A government (Uganda) that does not have a large and mature civil service that would support a G7 level technical domestic intelligence agency went to market for the tools of one (NSO), so they can keep tabs on foreign intelligence agents (state department staff) in their country. I am not a fan of NSO at all, but this case sounds like they're providing so…

The "oh, but everyone is doing it!" argument. I don't for a second believe that other countries install spyware on foreign diplomats and other peoples phones. What NSO and the Israeli government is doing is rotten to the core and unless you have evidence of the contrary you cannot assert that other actors are doing the same thing.

I know you're joking but for anyone that's not in on the joke:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-24690055

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

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Only if you count general American military spending Of course I do. Europe has no real army. France kinda has an army and the U.K got out. If America didn't provide a military umbrella Europe would need to actually build a real army (Europe's contributions to NATO are pitiful). How much would it cost the Europeans to do that? Going back since WW2 that's easily in the trillions.

Given that the US actively engages in military operations in defense of Israel, I would say that it not reasonable to attribute a larger share of the spending to Germany rather than Israel?

As opposed to the absolutely massive US military presence in Germany?
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