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Espionage Against the European Parliament

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Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#41

Post by EA-3167 »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #36
hammock wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US does not spy on Five Eyes government leadership or that of Israel. And perhaps more: in the wake of Snowden, which obliterated many diplomatic relationships the U.S. has with other countries, Obama issued a directive that the U.S. would not monitor heads of state and government of close friends and allies (even outside Five Eyes) unless there was a compelling national security reason. As far as we know that di…

> The US does not spy on Five Eyes government leadership or that of Israel. Doubt. > unless there was a compelling national security reason There always is.

Absolutely, and there's the same compelling reason for them to spy on the on the US in turn. I can't emphasize this enough, everyone is spying on everyone else. Close alliances give the impression that they don't because they tend to handle scandals in-house, it's for everyone's benefit to do so in most cases. Snowden's disclosure was a very unusual event and put everyone in a position of needing to act shocked, appalled, and put on a big show for the public; sweeping it under the rug was impossible. For all that many here would wish otherwise, Snowden wasn't a watershed though, it was a blip.

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#42

Post by DANmode »

bawolff wrote: post #24
pmontra wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"he did not recall receiving the Apple notifications" so he didn't notice them.

That is kind of surprising given he is on the comittee investigating pegasus. I'd assume someone on the comittee would be paying much more attention to this than a normal person. I wonder what triggered him to suspect he was hacked then. Since presumably something triggered him to have his phone forensically investigated.

If he knew he was compromised, and was okay with it for one reason or another (like money or other coercion), this is what his cleanup would look like.

Not saying this is likely. Just another possibility.

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#43

Post by benjiro29 »

hammock wrote: post #18
EA-3167 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems to be the case, although he claims to have somehow missed them. Overall this is one of those stories that's obviously an outrage, except for the fact that every country on Earth spies on the rest, and quite a few private entities do as well. Still the way the game is played if you get caught you have to act ashamed, and the people catching you get to gloat. It's silly, but it's a show the public never tire…

The US does not spy on Five Eyes government leadership or that of Israel. And perhaps more: in the wake of Snowden, which obliterated many diplomatic relationships the U.S. has with other countries, Obama issued a directive that the U.S. would not monitor heads of state and government of close friends and allies (even outside Five Eyes) unless there was a compelling national security reason. As far as we know that di…

> As far as we know that directive has remained in force with each successive administration as well.

People can state a lot, as long as your not caught.

Nothing prevent you from having the UK spy on the Germans, and feeding that intel back. Or Israel, or ... Hey, the US did not spy on a EU ally. Well, not directly and it neatly bypassed any official statements.

They might have simply gone to one of those secret court hearings and have it bypassed with a gag order in place. Officially its not done, unofficially, its been approved.

The whole "as long as you do not tell me your doing it" approach, and the politicians involve maintain deniability (even if they had the wink).

And you do not need to specific target the head off state. Plenty of side routes to still get information on meetings, that involve those heads of states. Even if your not "directly" spying on them.

So no, its a naïve way of thinking. Maybe in 20 years from now we find out, that they did spy on EU leaders. Maybe directly, maybe indirectly ... even with that directive in place. I will be amazed if they did not. Its the US we are talking about.

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#44

Post by drdexebtjl »

bawolff wrote: post #21

One interesting thing here, is they imply that both confidential personal medical information and confidential gov docs might have been compromised via the same phone. Does EU parliment not have a policy of seperating work and personal devices?

From what I understood, he took his compromised work phone to the hospital, and the concern is that it may have recorded conversations that contained personal medical information.

He didn’t have medical information on the phone.

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#45

Post by stavros »

jongjong wrote: post #37
DocTomoe wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Network effects are real. It is hard to convince people to move over to your platform if the selling argument is 'not quite there yet, but we got you covered on the minilib front, plus it's less usable because of our weird interpretation of our own data protection laws'.

Yes and my perspective is that GDPR has harmed EU startups and helped US companies by virtue of them being incumbents and having the resources to dedicate to compliance. Probably can't be fixed as easily now because of corporate culture around standards like SOC2 and ISO27001... Which I think are more harmful to security than helpful as they create complacency and hinder progress by creating barriers.

There's a decision to be made whether corporations should be allowed to do anything they want or not. The countries that choose to let them do what they want, will obviously give them an advantage over the countries that don't.

You and I, however, are not corporations, so maybe it's in our best interest if they actually aren't allowed to do whatever they want.

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#46

Post by benjiro29 »

stavros wrote: post #39
benjiro29 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fairly sure that if anybody using a advanced piece of hacking software, they are also going to delete any messages that are related to detection of such hardware. PC viruses used to do that stuff going back so many years ago. Suppressing any notification under Windows, by disabling the AV software, its notifications, windows notifications related to it. So it will amaze me that this is not done by any modern espionag…

Maybe the software can only exfiltrate information, rather than change it.

If i was going to write software on this level, that will be used by governments. There is no way, its going to be a nice little program that only extract information.

Its going to have every trick in the book (and outside it), to stay hidden. And it will have payloads to alter its behavior, updates, etc...

Nobody is going to pay you big fat money envelops for software that anybody can write in a afternoon. You want it to be as capable as ever, and you do not want it found!

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#47

Post by sanguinesphinx »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #40
petcat wrote: post #4

> In May 2026, Kouloglou contacted the Citizen Lab and we conducted a forensic analysis of artifacts from his iPhone. We found with high confidence that his device was successfully infected with Pegasus spyware on or around October 21, 2022, and again on March 6 and 7, 2023.

I wonder if we can forensically analyze our own phones to see if some nutjob with Pegasus has targeted us as well.

How many nutjobs with Pegasus are really running around out there?

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#49

Post by stavros »

benjiro29 wrote: post #46
stavros wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the software can only exfiltrate information, rather than change it.

If i was going to write software on this level, that will be used by governments. There is no way, its going to be a nice little program that only extract information. Its going to have every trick in the book (and outside it), to stay hidden. And it will have payloads to alter its behavior, updates, etc... Nobody is going to pay you big fat money envelops for software that anybody can write in a afternoon. You want…

I mean maybe the exploits they found weren't good enough to allow them to do whatever they want with the phone.

Re: Espionage Against the European Parliament

#50

Post by freehorse »

elorant wrote: post #17

Around that time a lot of politicians in Greece had their phones hacked by Pegasus. It's an ongoing scandal in Greece that never got fully resolved, although all evidence indicate that it was an operation orchestrated by the office of the prime minister in coordination with the local intelligence service. So I wouldn't call that an attack against the European parliament.

small correction, that is predator/intellexa, not pegasus/nso. So this is different
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