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A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

reuters.com

131–140 of 184 posts

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#131

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That's not a solution. You're just piping the outside data into your sandbox; it can have bugs too.

This is why I run a 1-task only Windows VM inside a Linux VM on a Mac. Ain’t nobody ripping through x3 0-days for my chats.

Macwinux

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#132
post #127

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As long as people aren't put in jail for faulty software, it will never be fixed. Remember Diginotar? Who knows how many lives were affected in Iran...

Surgeons aren't put in jail for faulty surgery. Wanting this for software is a bit draconian.

Surgeons can be held accountable and can lose their license at least.

That has never happened to software developers.

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#133
post #64

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It's just a very minor victory for women's rights and it was a very impractical law anyway. It's still a very oppressive country where being a dissident means getting threatening phone calls from the security agencies. Remember 2011 when there were popular protests all around the Arab world? Well they tried to do one in Saudi as well but the intimidation was so high, that it never got off the ground.

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wonders of i'net..

you know, there is something called female circumcision. And the society+culture behind it, has been applying it even on women born and living outside it, when they once visited their relatives..

(described in book: Ever Since Adam and Eve: The Evolution of Human Sexuality - Malcolm Potts and Roger Short, 1999)

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#134

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You are probably right, but this attack only became visible because it had a bug. How many others are invisible currently? Well that's what I'm asking myself :)

A lot, but they're still only used for high-value targets. They're way too valuable to waste on some random person who happens to click a link.

That's a bad argument for defense.

If it can be used on one random person then it can be used on the hundreds of millions of random persons who use iPhone and Android.

And getting even 1% of those massive user bases to click on a link and steal their money or private information, would be incredibly lucrative even for the short period until the patch rolls out, especially for the wealthier iOS userbase as a target.

In my EU country, I'm still getting regular spam SMS with links to what I presume is some older Android malware that wrecked havock last year. So, if attackers are still at it, months after a patch was rolled out, it means they must be still getting returns on their "investment".

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#135

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Holy shit. My relatives have asked me in the past "could this [image|video|other supposedly innocuous file format] be a virus or hack my phone?". I've always told them not to worry. Can't do that anymore.

These exploits are only really an issue for your grandparents and whoever if some large-scale mass hack is happening[^2]. As long as they stay up-to-date, anyone not targeted by nation state actors and not holding millions in cryptocurrency[0] likely has nothing to worry about, as these exploits are better used hacking journalists trying to expose corruption or political opponents running against the incumbent[1]. 0:…

I think it’s very possible to be in the grey zone. For example, I have worked as an activist, and a campaign I led was widely lauded by the mainstream media as being the key factor in a powerful government minister losing. Now, this is a western liberal democracy that probably doesn’t need to buy tools from NSO Group. But still, am I a fair target? Or what about a friend who is a journalist whose articles have recently attracted negative attention from the government of a fairly corrupt, despotic nation. Are they are target? I’m not talking about Snowden or Assange or executives at trillion dollar companies. In my circle I know a bunch of folk who are basically just normal people with jobs, but for whom their job means that someone working for some government somewhere might like to read their texts. How wide is the net? How can we protect ourselves?

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#137
post #89

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On a brighter note, apple is currently in the process of converting almost all iMessage components to Swift for this reason. I'm sure it is taking many engineering hours, and image parsers/open source libraries like this are the most difficult to convert.

Is there a link that mentions this ? The bug was in the ImageIO/Core Graphics layer so are they re-writing all Core Graphics components in Swift ?

Yeah, something tells me that they're not going to be rewriting an image decoder to have a runtime...

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#138
post #33

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Holy shit. My relatives have asked me in the past "could this [image|video|other supposedly innocuous file format] be a virus or hack my phone?". I've always told them not to worry. Can't do that anymore.

"Cook's egg" is a recommended reading. Summary here (spoilers ahead): https://icdt.osu.edu/cuckoos-egg

That summary sparks interest indeed, thanks for recommending! Just ordered a copy.

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#139
post #98

How come the company that made Pegasus is being sanctioned, but the government that used Pegasus to abduct, kill, and then dismember a dissident - isn't?

That government is an important US ally.

By all the things the US does for them, they must be really important.

Re: A Saudi woman's iPhone revealed hacking around the world

#140
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That government is an important US ally.

By all the things the US does for them, they must be really important.

Well look at the map. Look at neighbors. Look how many 9/11 culprits came from there. Look what is in the ground. US is more than happy to keep such dictators in place to get access and control over all this and more.

It really doesn't matter how many people they behead or cut to pieces in their embassies, if you are not US citizen you mean little to nothing and its explicitly stated in US laws. I guess common americans have no idea how much this pisses large parts of the world.

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