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Poland’s PM says previous government illegally used Pegasus spyware

apnews.com

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Re: Poland’s PM says previous government illegally used Pegasus spyware

#81
post #56
post #4

“Poland and the demon in democracy” https://theupheaval.substack.com/p/poland-and-the-demon-in-d...

> The former top European Union official’s party only won 30% of the vote compared to the 36% of his incumbent conservative, EU-skeptical rivals, the Law and Justice (PiS) party, but was nonetheless able to assemble a coalition of leftists to take power. Just one party in this coalition is from the left. The rest is decidedly centre to centre-right. Hard to treat this piece seriously.

It feels surreal to hear this crap translated into English

Re: Poland’s PM says previous government illegally used Pegasus spyware

#82
post #80

Is Pegasus still working, or OS manufacturers patched the vulnerabilities it was using?

Pegasus is only the malware that has the spying capabilities (file upload, download and command execution...etc).

it usually infects the intended target using an exploit (0-day) that doesnt have a fix, if you're asking if there are 0days that can hack modern iPhones, the answer is most likely yes, given the most recent hack against the iPhone of one of the executives of the russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1f6YyH62jFE

Re: Poland’s PM says previous government illegally used Pegasus spyware

#83
post #76
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pegasus is notoriously sold to more than 40 countries worldwide, among them a fair share of dictatorships: Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, (Hungary?), Bahrain, Russia...

You truly have some bias in your definition of dictatorship.

A bias towards democracy.

Re: Poland’s PM says previous government illegally used Pegasus spyware

#84

Fuck NSO Group.

NSO is just a strawman for the government of Israel. Surveillance technology is a very successful soft power tool, as the dictators crave its capabilities to stay in power. Pegasus is world class technology, so Israel could score a lot of brownie points by allowing these sales. Too bad they got too greedy and sloppy and allowed the phones of some US officials in Africa to be infected. Coincidentally there was a leak…

Yep. One could also say "fuck state surveillance", but it doesn't have quite the same ring to it (and coincidentally implicates Apple and the NSA).

Re: Poland’s PM says previous government illegally used Pegasus spyware

#85
post #19
post #10

1 Over 7000 licenses for Pegasus alone. Both opposition and own party surveilled. 2 Usage of Pegasus means all intercepts are on the servers in Israel. All Government secrets and potential kompromat transferred to foreign power.

3. And most importantly: all of that funded by the taxpayer, to satisfy one man's paranoia.

Even worse. Pegasus was all paid from the 'Justice Fund', which was intended to help crime victims.

https://www.funduszsprawiedliwosci.gov.pl

"The Justice Fund provides immediate and free emergency assistance to crime victims, witnesses and their closest relatives, including victims of armed aggression in Ukraine.

You can use the free:

legal aid, psychological help, material assistance"

Quite fitting considering previous corrupt regime was ran by PIS, which doesnt stand for piss but 'Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc' - Law and Justice.

Re: Poland’s PM says previous government illegally used Pegasus spyware

#88
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? It serves no purpose, if it wasn't them, it would be New NSO Group instead. So long as these vulnerabilities exist, they're going to be exploited. Every time they find an exploit it's a moment of pure genius. With every new baseband and every new OS update there's a good chance that they find they have no answer. I don't blame the hackers in the slightest. It's also not useful to blame governments. More useful t…

What? Pegasus is not enabled by modem vulnerabilities. The primary vulnerabilities used on iOS phones are in Apple designed and implemented components and the primary vulnerabilities used on Android phones are in Google designed and implemented components. The problem is not that Google and Apple did not have the opportunity to secure the vulnerable components. The problem is that their best teams with thousands of p…

> The problem is that all of these large companies have failed for literal decades to develop systems secure against competent attackers.

I don't think they tried. One of their main customer is a 3 letter agency which has no interest that the bugs get fixed.

Re: Poland’s PM says previous government illegally used Pegasus spyware

#90
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poland isn’t a dictatorship, it’s an EU member state and a member of NATO. Also let’s not compare malware/spyware to nuclear weapons. Poland can get their hands on any weapon or controlled technology they pretty much want.

Pegasus is notoriously sold to more than 40 countries worldwide, among them a fair share of dictatorships: Saudi Arabia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, (Hungary?), Bahrain, Russia...

It wasn’t sold to neither Russia or Belarus, and the rest are countries that we sell weapons too all the time.

And I find it laughable that you out Hungary as a dictatorship it’s an EU member and a NATO member.

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