For more than a decade, dozens of journalists and human rights activists have been targeted and hacked by governments all over the world. Cops and spies in Ethiopia, Greece, Hungary, India, Mexico, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates, among others, have used sophisticated spyware to compromise the phones of these victims, who at times have also faced real-world violence being intimidated, harassed, and in extreme cases, even murdered.
In the last few years, in the fight to protect these higher-risk communities, a team of a dozen digital security experts, mostly based in Costa Rica, Manila, and Tunisia, among other places, have played a key role. They work for the New York-headquartered nonprofit Access Now, specifically its Digital Security Helpline.
Read more…
Source: TechCrunch News
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- Is Fighting Cyber-Espionage Against Dissidents Getting Difficult?
June 11, 2023
Spying on opposition leaders, dissidents and critics has always been a norm in countries ruled by right-wing, fascist or authoritarian governments. The latest method has been to use emerging technologies which penetrate email accounts or smartphones and acquire all information about such activists, politicians, or scribes. One of them is the Pegasus spyware, developed by an ...
- Android apps with 30 million downloads contain SpinOk Android malware — delete these now
June 5, 2023
Following the discovery that over a hundred Android apps with 400 million combined downloads actually contained the SpinOk malware, security researchers have now found that an additional 92 apps are also affected. For those unaware, SpinOk is a spyware module that was being distributed as a software development kit (SDK) for advertisers. First discovered by the ...
- US govt pushes spyware to other countries? Senator Wyden would like a word
May 26, 2023
The US International Trade Administration (ITA) has admitted it promotes the sale of American-approved commercial spyware to foreign governments, and won’t answer questions about it, according to US Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR). Wyden, in a letter to US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, has demanded answers about the surveillance and policing tech that ITA – a US ...
- Mercenary mayhem: A technical analysis of Intellexa’s PREDATOR spyware
May 25, 2023
Commercial spyware use is on the rise, with actors leveraging these sophisticated tools to conduct surveillance operations against a growing number of targets. Cisco Talos has new details of a commercial spyware product sold by the spyware firm Intellexa (formerly known as Cytrox). Cisco Talos research specifically looks at two components of this mobile spyware suite ...
- Suspected Chinese cyber spies target unpatched SonicWall devices
March 9, 2023
Suspected Chinese cyber criminals have zeroed in on unpatched SonicWall gateways and are infecting the devices with credential-stealing malware that persists through firmware upgrades, according to Mandiant. The spyware targets the SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 100 Series – a gateway device that provides VPN access to remote users. Read more… Source: The Register
- US Supremes deny Pegasus spyware maker’s immunity claim
January 9, 2023
The US Supreme Court has quashed spyware maker NSO Group’s argument that it cannot be held legally responsible for using WhatsApp technology to deploy its Pegasus snoop-ware on users’ phones. Facebook and its WhatsApp subsidiary sued the notorious Isreal-based software company in 2019, alleging that NSO exploited a zero-day bug in WhatsApp to remotely drop Pegasus ...
