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There is a unclear reference to Intel in the article. Was Intel working with NSO? "In recent weeks, for instance, Intel asked all its employees to cease any ongoing business relationships with NSO, one person familiar with the matter said. Intel said in a statement that it “complies with all applicable US laws, including US export control regulations”."
There is a unclear reference to Intel in the article. Was Intel working with NSO? "In recent weeks, for instance, Intel asked all its employees to cease any ongoing business relationships with NSO, one person familiar with the matter said. Intel said in a statement that it “complies with all applicable US laws, including US export control regulations”."
> The blacklisting, which came in November, means that NSO cannot buy any equipment, service, or intellectual property from US-based companies without approval, crippling a company whose terminals ran on servers from Dell and Intel, routers from Cisco, and whose desktop computers run on Windows operating systems, according to a spec sheet from a sale to Ghana, in West Africa
>when Google reverse-engineered the hack used against American diplomats in Uganda, they found an elegant, tiny piece of code that adapted software from 1990s Xerox machines to fit a so-called Turing machine — essentially a complete computer — into a single GIF file. LOL at describing PDFs as "adapted software from 1990s Xerox machines" https://googleprojectzero.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-deep-dive-i...
Having spent some time with OCR and scanning recently, I'd have to agree. A lot of news articles are describing JBIG2 as something archaic, when it seems to be as relevant and commonplace as ever. (see MRC, for a modern application)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
US nationals have never been protected. If you make an international phone call the government can track it[1]. If its internal they can't without a warrant NSO built in a complete block of +1 phone numbers. But those US diplomats were not using +1. Which itself is a security issue that i'm sure is already being discussed at the state department [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/04/07/dea-bulk-tele...
Would that imply that it would function as well for Canadian phone numbers, since they share a country code?
But given the number of countries under nanpa, I bet they filter at the area code level. Can’t turn away that sweet Dominican Republic opportunity.
How does data work if you get NSO’d? There’s gotta be some Canadians facing massive mobile phone bills because of NSO shenanigans.
I commented previously that the Uganda case was the first truly legitimate application of NSO's tech and the first one that wasn't actually a scandal, as it was by a state without a mature domestic intelligence capability going to market to buy tools of one, to spy on actual spies in its borders. It seems this particular NSO case is being used as bargaining leverage to discredit Israel's position in the Iran nuclear…
How do you intend to support your claim that the 11 US diplomats and employees from the US embassy are spies (and thus are supposedly legitimate targets in your view)?
Nowhere does it say US spies were the targets. And no other story on this subject has presented evidence of that either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the US really regarded cyberattacks as an act of war, it would be actively shooting missiles and bullets at China right now . The US regards cyberattacks as acts of war when convenient, nothing more.
Nuclear powers can't make full-scale war on each other. If they ever do, the death toll would make WW2 look like a skirmish. So any attacks are at the edges (respond in kind, or proportionately, rather than escalate to a shooting war).
I don't disagree with your point, simply saying that IMO the US doesn't take cyberattacks seriously precisely because it leads down a dark path with China (and probably Russia too if we're being honest).
Which is odd because NSO made many assurances to the US govt they were in control of the tech and that US nationals were not to be included. Looks like they weren't in as much control as they stated they were.
Maybe NSO didn't allow it to be used on US numbers. How are they supposed to know the nationality of the user of a phone? > NSO has always told its customers that US phone numbers are off-limits. In this case, all 11 targets were using Ugandan numbers, but had Apple logins using their state department emails, according to the two US officials.
That's why you do recon before targeting somebody.
Do you suppose they just sprayed the malware onto random phones?
I get the impression that Pegasus is meant to be used in a very targeted way, at people you have identified before, and have some reason to spy on. If you do that way, what are you chances of wanting to target somebody else, and accidentally getting 11 US embassy employees?
NSO promised oversight, they can't just weasel they way out by saying "there's no way would could have implemented effective oversight".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would that imply that it would function as well for Canadian phone numbers, since they share a country code?
Shhhh, don’t tell them about the n in nanpa. But given the number of countries under nanpa, I bet they filter at the area code level. Can’t turn away that sweet Dominican Republic opportunity. How does data work if you get NSO’d? There’s gotta be some Canadians facing massive mobile phone bills because of NSO shenanigans.
> brought in between $10 million and $20 million, a fraction of the $243 million I mean I guess 7.5% is technically “a fraction”, but I’m used to this phrasing meaning “a really tiny fraction”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Having spent some time with OCR and scanning recently, I'd have to agree. A lot of news articles are describing JBIG2 as something archaic, when it seems to be as relevant and commonplace as ever. (see MRC, for a modern application)
The article was originally written for Financial Times, whose audience will have a general knowledge of computing. Also, what the heck is MRC?
Basically, you scan a paper document. It contains a mixture of line art, text, and photographs—“mixed” types of content. You can segment it and use different codecs to encode these different segments, and then combine the results in a PDF.