Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WhatsApp voice calls were used to inject spyware on phones

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 313 posts

Re: WhatsApp voice calls were used to inject spyware on phones

#121

Post by metildaa »

Semaphor wrote: post #111
winter_blue wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huawei's software development practices seem quite horrifying. Critical systems like these ideally would be written in specially-designed programming languages that support mathematically proving correctness (Coq comes to mind). There's probably still room in the programming language design field to create new languages that are user-friendly but also integrate Coq-like systems plus other verifiability and correctnes…

If you find that horrifying, don't look at Cisco CVEs ;)

Or Juniper's constant flow of new CVEs, they are a popular alternative to Cisco that many ISPs use heavily :P

Network security is piss poor, most of these vendors add vulnerabilties atop secure distros (OpenWRT, Debian, etc) and flog it as the best thing since sliced bread.

Re: WhatsApp voice calls were used to inject spyware on phones

#122

Post by bikeshed »

coreman wrote: post #51
sb057 wrote: post #41

This is the same country that has a secret nuclear stockpile (developed in partnership with Apartheid South Africa) with plans to use the threat of bombing their European "allies" as blackmail. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option

The "Samson Option" is a conspiracy theory that if Israel is ever at the brink of destruction it will nuke Europe and America. It is a conspiracy theory based on the ramblings of one Israeli historian and one American author. Israel has nuclear weapons and its MAD policies are probably the same as other nuclear powers. It's funny because Putin has actually said that Russia will end up destroying the entire world in r…

Has it ever been established that Israel has nuclear weapons? As far as I’ve heard it’s just a rumour.

Re: WhatsApp voice calls were used to inject spyware on phones

#123

Post by kasey_junk »

tptacek wrote: post #102
icelancer wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Normally I agree with you on almost everything in this realm, since, well, it's your field of expertise. But XE/Blackwater/whatever has plenty of support staff enabling operators overseas. Just because you don't carry an M4 while you cash your check from the organization doesn't mean you aren't helping them in their missions. If you sell vulns and tools to spyware firms, you know exactly who the most likely high bidd…

Those people actually work for Blackwater. People who sell vulnerabilities by and large have only a vague idea of their customers. Many exploit developers would, for instance, draw a line between enablement of FVEY national SIGINT and shady spyware shops like NSO, and can rationalize that it's the good guys who are getting their bugs. I'm not saying that makes it OK (I think the opposite thing, in fact, though I feel…

I think your mental model of how blackwater (and other contracting firms) works is off.

The vast majority of employees at these firms work for Aramark, or its equivalent.

Re: WhatsApp voice calls were used to inject spyware on phones

#125

Post by dang »

accountwhatever wrote: post #109

Why was the word "Israeli" removed from the title?

I took it out because the thread was veering into generic flamewar about Israel. Actually we often remove country names from titles because they trigger people into making more nationalistic comments, which are equal parts indignant and boring.

Re: WhatsApp voice calls were used to inject spyware on phones

#126

Post by dang »

kurthr wrote: post #112

The title has been modified. WhatsApp voice calls used to inject Israeli spyware on phones

Sure, we take out the baity parts of titles because they produce lousier discussion. This is standard HN moderation: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19906729 for more explanation.

Re: WhatsApp voice calls were used to inject spyware on phones

#127

Post by tptacek »

kasey_junk wrote: post #123
tptacek wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those people actually work for Blackwater. People who sell vulnerabilities by and large have only a vague idea of their customers. Many exploit developers would, for instance, draw a line between enablement of FVEY national SIGINT and shady spyware shops like NSO, and can rationalize that it's the good guys who are getting their bugs. I'm not saying that makes it OK (I think the opposite thing, in fact, though I feel…

I think your mental model of how blackwater (and other contracting firms) works is off. The vast majority of employees at these firms work for Aramark, or its equivalent.

If that's the case, I stand corrected, and they're actually pretty similar.

Re: WhatsApp voice calls were used to inject spyware on phones

#128

Post by accountwhatever »

dang wrote: post #125
accountwhatever wrote: post #109

Why was the word "Israeli" removed from the title?

I took it out because the thread was veering into generic flamewar about Israel. Actually we often remove country names from titles because they trigger people into making more nationalistic comments, which are equal parts indignant and boring.

Oh, I see, that makes a lot of sense actually. Thank you for your service!

Re: WhatsApp voice calls were used to inject spyware on phones

#129

Post by MagicPropmaker »

a-dub wrote: post #23

Maybe that would explain the mysterious WhatsApp voice call I received about a week ago in the middle of the night from an unknown number? It's still in the history so maybe that means it didn't work?

Are you involved with anything that would make you think you'd be worth someone's time and money to be spying on? Most likely it was a wrong number.

Re: WhatsApp voice calls were used to inject spyware on phones

#130

Post by mmsimanga »

eof wrote: post #30
bjourne wrote: post #7

All my life I've thought spyware was developed primarily by evil Russian and Chinese hackers. But apparently also by Israeli developers with their government's blessing and open endorsement. That's some very shady stuff. Before someone says something about government surveillance of fiber cables. Yes, that is also bad, but exploiting vulnerabilities to install spyware on peoples phones... It crosses yet another line…

I love how you’ve been convinced that Russia and China are naughty and Israel is somehow too good to be shady.

To be fair it's not just about the software but about the country too. We know know China's policy on censoring the web. Russia is not the sort of place that tolerates activism against Putin. So when you combine this with hacking people's phones it does make it much worse.
Post reply on HN