Meet the team that investigates when journalists and activists get hacked with government spyware


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:

  • Fake Mobile Apps Steal Facebook Credentials, Cryptocurrency-Related Keys

    May 16, 2022

    Trend Micro researchers recently observed a number of apps on Google Play designed to perform malicious activities such as stealing user credentials and other sensitive user information, including private keys. Because of the number and popularity of these apps — some of them have been installed over a hundred thousand times — we decided to ...

  • Spain fires intelligence chief amid phone hacking scandals

    May 10, 2022

    Spain’s government fired the director of the country’s top intelligence agency Tuesday following the hacking of politicians’ cellphones, including the devices of the prime minister and several supporters of the Catalonia region’s secession. The National Intelligence Center, or CNI, has been under fire for its role in spying on Catalan separatists and for taking a full ...

  • Spanish PM, defense minister latest Pegasus spyware victims

    May 2, 2022

    Spain’s prime minister and defense minister are the latest elected officials to detect Pegasus spyware on their mobile phones, according to multiple media reports quoting Spanish authorities. During a press conference on Monday, Félix Bolaños, the minister for the presidency, told reporters that cellphones of Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez and defense minister Margarita Robles were ...

  • UK Prime Minister, Catalan groups ‘targeted by NSO Pegasus spyware’

    April 18, 2022

    Citizen Lab has reported finding suspected surveillance software on devices associated with both the UK Prime Minister’s Office and what was formerly called the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office. The Canadian research outfit also said it had identified at least 65 individuals linked with Catalan civil society groups in Spain who were targeted by, or infected ...

  • Borat RAT: Multiple threat of ransomware, DDoS and spyware

    April 4, 2022

    A new remote access trojan (RAT) dubbed “Borat” doesn’t come with many laughs but offers bad actors a menu of cyberthreats to choose from. RATs are typically used by cybercriminals to get full control of a victim’s system, enabling them to access files and network resources and manipulate the mouse and keyboard. Borat does all this ...

  • How a Saudi woman’s iPhone revealed hacking around the world

    February 17, 2022

    A single activist helped turn the tide against NSO Group, one of the world’s most sophisticated spyware companies now facing a cascade of legal action and scrutiny in Washington over damaging new allegations that its software was used to hack government officials and dissidents around the world. It all started with a software glitch on her ...