91–100 of 360 posts
Since NSO is able to do these 0 click exploits on iphones does this mean they have have hacked apple engs as well and have copies of iOS lying around?
Like they just HAVE to have the source code right?
Thanks god you can remove Messages.app nowadays
This shows how un-theoretical that question is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's still pretty expensive! NSO charged a flat $500,000 fee for installing Pegasus. It charged government agencies $650,000 to spy on 10 iPhones; $650,000 for 10 Android users; $500,000 for five BlackBerry users; or $300,000 for five Symbian users.
Feels weird that a private company can target individuals for a price. How was this legal? Isn’t it illegal to hack the phone of a private individual? Or do they simply say here’s the tool, here’s the manual, do what you want just don’t tell us?
As other have commented, this is absolutely mind-bogglingly hard core. Kudos to the NSO group engineers who designed and built this (regardless of your allegiances and whether you like or dislike that they do this and whether it's objectively good or evil or somewhere in between, you have to admit that it's deeply technically impressive). Does anyone have a sense of who they sold this to and who used this particular…
Sorry but can't agree here - this stuff is proper evil for most of world population, which includes also most of HN readers (no its not just SV and 5 other guys). Its more often than not used to oppress common citizens, freedom thinkers and truth sayers. They are actively making this world a much worse place long term, and why - pure greed for money and power. They don't even try to act like there is some moral / law…
As other have commented, this is absolutely mind-bogglingly hard core. Kudos to the NSO group engineers who designed and built this (regardless of your allegiances and whether you like or dislike that they do this and whether it's objectively good or evil or somewhere in between, you have to admit that it's deeply technically impressive). Does anyone have a sense of who they sold this to and who used this particular…
This isn't a one-time thing. They're a funnel.
It's a real shame that the people who came up with this exploit are working for NSO and not on solving P = NP or something. I'm sure if we got them and the ones working on crypto at NSA in a room together, we'd have it and clean unlimited energy in a week. I often feel sad thinking about how many brilliant engineers are dedicating their time to helping governments spy on people or other governments.
~ Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera
This quote isn't just about people working directly on ad tech and ad targeting algorithms, but any product that is "free" and ad supported.
This is mind boggling. NSO used a compression format's instructions to create logic gates and then from there "a small computer architecture with features such as registers and a full 64-bit adder and comparator which they use to search memory and perform arithmetic operations", all within a single pass of decompression. Combine this with a buffer overflow and you've got your sploit.
I was confused about how they got the thing to run for an unbounded amount of time, but I guess they probably have the final operation at the end of a "processor cycle" be to overwrite the next SegRef so that it loops back to the current SegRef.
I'd love to see the thing in more detail - what the shellcode looks like, how the CPU was designed, everything.
a scummy company but such transcendental brilliance..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its amazing how they took a buffer overflow and ran with it to create a whole turing complete machine. Its mind boggling how complex these exploits can be, no wonder they sell for millions
It also demonstrates how much more work there is after “buffer overflow” until you get to RCE.
Historically the jump from overflow to RCE was much much shorter.
Still the iMessage attack surface is just massive and running in an unsafe language kind of crazy?