#Pegasus Spyware

[vyorei]

Good fucking lord I don't even have the words

[makingdonalddrumpfagain]

[thoughtlessarse]

Anas Altikriti was in London, and busy, on the day in July 2020 when his phone was hacked. He frequently works as a hostage negotiator and, at the time, he was negotiating a deal to free a hostage being held on the Libya–Chad border. Altikriti also had a meeting with former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. But his schedule did not include having his phone infiltrated by Pegasus, the phone hacking software made by Israel’s NSO Group. Four years later, Altikriti, an Iraqi-born British citizen and vocal critic of the United Arab Emirates, is filing a report to the Metropolitan Police in London accusing the Israeli spyware firm NSO Group of complicity in the targeted hacking of his phone. On Wednesday, he filed the complaint about NSO and its associates alongside three fellow U.K.-based human rights defenders whose phones were also hacked. “This case has some real legs,” said Leanna Burnard, a lawyer at the nonprofit Global Legal Action Network, who prepared the complaint. “The U.K. shouldn’t stand for the hacking of human rights defenders on its own soil.” Assembled with the help of advocates from GLAN on behalf of the victims, the extensively footnoted filing sent to the Metropolitan Police, which was obtained by The Intercept, puts the ball in the police’s court. The police now have discretion over whether to open an investigation and subsequently bring charges. “Due to regulatory constraints, we cannot confirm or deny any alleged specific customers,” Gil Lanier, vice president for global communications at NSO, told The Intercept. “NSO complies with all laws and regulations and sells its technologies exclusively to vetted intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Our customers use these technologies daily, as Pegasus continues to play a crucial role in thwarting terrorist activities, breaking up criminal rings, and saving thousands of lives.” The Metropolitan Police declined to comment. The U.S. blacklisted NSO in 2021 after its software was accused of enabling human rights abuses by the company’s authoritarian government clients. Amnesty International has said NSO was complicit in many of these phone hackings. 

continue reading

[beatrix-morrigan]

Open Letter to My Computer Science Students In the Wake of the Temporary Restraining Order

A TA at UCSD reflects on the unprecedented temporary restraining order granted against UAW 4811 's spring 2024 strike, and how CS is fueling modern genocide.

https://beatrix-morrigan.github.io/writing/in-the-wake-of-the-TRO.html

[garudabluffs]

They Exposed an Israeli Spyware Firm. Now the Company Is Badgering Them in Court. May 6 2024

NSO Group, which makes Pegasus spyware, keeps trying to extract information from Citizen Lab researchers — and a judge keeps swatting it down.

"For years, cybersecurity researchers at Citizen Lab have monitored Israeli spyware firm NSO Group and its banner product, Pegasus. In 2019, Citizen Lab reported finding dozens of cases in which Pegasus was used to target the phones of journalists and human rights defenders via a WhatsApp security vulnerability.

Now NSO, which is blacklisted by the U.S. government for selling spyware to repressive regimes, is trying to use a lawsuit over the WhatsApp exploit to learn “how Citizen Lab conducted its analysis.”

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. federal court in 2019 by WhatsApp and Meta (then Facebook), alleges that NSO sent Pegasus and other malware to approximately 1,400 devices across the globe. For more than four years, NSO has failed repeatedly to get the case thrown out."

READ MORE https://theintercept.com/2024/05/06/pegasus-nso-group-israeli-spyware-citizen-lab/

[robpegoraro]

Weekly output: spectrum policy, Snapdragon Seamless, spyware defenses, AI guardrails, Mark Vena podcast

For the fourth weekend in a row, I went on a long bike ride–this time, out the C&O Canal trail to Great Falls. That was one of the first destinations I visited on two wheels after I bought a bike in 1994, and the sight of the Potomac crashing over rocks has not gotten old over the 29 years since. It’s also nice to confirm that my aging body is not, in fact, too old for this. Patreon readers got a…

[liondapearl]

"The European problem is that they were part once a genocide against the Jews and lot of the believes the Jews have to be right or the will be called Nazist." Wtf? Once again Europe is a continent not a country, it was Nazi Germany that did that. Why are you blaming all of Europe for that? Millions of people died fighting against Nazi Germany

Let me tell you about the Hungarian view.

First of all I personally hate this situation.

I try to educate people about the facts, but no matter what I try to show them they came up with "how much the jewish suffered how that land was theirs since forever. And they got killed."

Lot of people just saying all Arab are terrorist. 

Reasoning that palestine as a country never excited. 

They says I am the crazy one no matter what statistic I show to them, they dont care about that the Palestinians don't have water electricity. 

The are reasoning they got support before, why did they spent on guns?

All the Hungarian media is sided by the government of Israel. They forgotten that the Pegasus softwer was used against them. Our grovernment used the spyware to observe politicians journalist every person who are against the FIDESZ. This softwer one of the reason why we couldn't get any EU support in Hungary. Nobody got ever charged from the Ministry of Justice. It happened one or two years ago and the case is under the rug.

So I don't know how can I help more, because whenever I am speaking up I got the Crazy lady mark

I know I was wrong by saying every European country. And every European people. I am sorry.

[makingdonalddrumpfagain]

[thoughtlessarse]

Languages: Bulgarian

Civil society organisations demanded comprehensive legislation banning spyware throughout the EU, citing widespread misuse and insufficient regulation, in a joint statement on Tuesday (3 September). Spyware regulation has been hotly debated in the EU since revelations in July 2021 that malicious spyware software, particularly Israeli-developed Pegasus, was used to target politicians, journalists, and activists. “We regret that the EU institutions have failed to provide effective solutions […] to the numerous reports of maladministration and abuse of power by member states during the last legislative term,” reads the joint statement. Civil society groups said that existing regulations on press freedom are either insufficient or contain loopholes. They called on the Commission to ban “the production, export, sale, import, acquisition, transfer, servicing and use of spyware.” This position is a far cry from existing EU government practices. “All member states have purchased or used one or more spyware systems”, concluded a European Parliament special committee on Pegasus in May 2023. Signatories of the statement include the Center for Democracy & Technology Europe, the European Digital Rights Network, the European Federation of Journalists, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Civil Liberties Union for Europe, ARTICLE 19, Access Now, and Wikimedia Europe. The Commission’s Directorate-Generals of justice, trade, and internal market should coordinate on legislation to ban spyware spyware, Director of the Security, Surveillance and Human Rights Programme at the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), Silvia Lorenzo Perez, told Euractiv.

continue reading

[humanrightsupdates]

A U.S. district court has ordered Israeli spyware firm NSO Group to disclose documents and code related to its notorious Pegasus spyware, to WhatsApp.

Responding to the news, the Head of the Security Lab at Amnesty International, Donncha Ó Cearbhaill said:

“This decision brings us a step closer towards accountability for up to 1,400 WhatsApp users targeted with Pegasus spyware in this case, as well as the countless other individuals around the world, who have continued to be targeted since this case was filed in 2019. This court order sends a clear signal to the surveillance industry that it cannot continue to enable spyware abuse with impunity.

“NSO Group says that it only sells Pegasus to authorized government customers. Our Security Lab has documented the massive scale and breadth of the use of Pegasus against human rights defenders and journalists across the world. It is vital that targets of Pegasus find out who has purchased and deployed the spyware against them so that they can seek meaningful redress.” (Amnesty International)

[odinsblog]

(source)

In June 2019, three Israeli computer engineers arrived at a New Jersey building used by the F.B.I. They unpacked dozens of computer servers, arranging them on tall racks in an isolated room. As they set up the equipment, the engineers made a series of calls to their bosses in Herzliya, a Tel Aviv suburb, at the headquarters for NSO Group, the world’s most notorious maker of spyware. Then, with their equipment in place, they began testing.

The F.B.I. had bought a version of Pegasus, NSO’s premier spying tool. For nearly a decade, the Israeli firm had been selling its surveillance software on a subscription basis to law-enforcement and intelligence agencies around the world, promising that it could do what no one else — not a private company, not even a state intelligence service — could do: consistently and reliably crack the encrypted communications of any iPhone or Android smartphone.

Since NSO had introduced Pegasus to the global market in 2011, it had helped Mexican authorities capture Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo. European investigators have quietly used Pegasus to thwart terrorist plots, fight organized crime and, in one case, take down a global child-abuse ring, identifying dozens of suspects in more than 40 countries. In a broader sense, NSO’s products seemed to solve one of the biggest problems facing law-enforcement and intelligence agencies in the 21st century: that criminals and terrorists had better technology for encrypting their communications than investigators had to decrypt them. The criminal world had gone dark even as it was increasingly going global.

But by the time the company’s engineers walked through the door of the New Jersey facility in 2019, the many abuses of Pegasus had also been well documented. Mexico deployed the software not just against gangsters but also against journalists and political dissidents. The United Arab Emirates used the software to hack the phone of a civil rights activist whom the government threw in jail. Saudi Arabia used it against women’s rights activists and, according to a lawsuit filed by a Saudi dissident, to spy on communications with Jamal Khashoggi, a columnist for The Washington Post, whom Saudi operatives killed and dismembered in Istanbul in 2018.

(continue reading)

[duubsite]

Apple Drops Its Lawsuit Against NSO Group: A Prudential Decision?

In a surprising turn of events, Apple has moved to dismiss its lawsuit against the Israeli spyware maker NSO Group, known for their controversial Pegasus spyware. The decision, filed in a U.S. District Court, comes almost two years after Apple initially sued the company. The main reason cited for dropping the lawsuit is the potential risk to iOS security. But what does this mean for both Apple…

[dbunicorn]

I used to live quite near the Coquitlam school district where Amanda Todd committed suicide. Nothing has changed in 10 years with school districts, teachers, parents or social media. In Seattle they just passed a caste discrimination law which I think is a joke since no nation can even get the basics of rule of law right and censorship is rampant in India. Spyware is being deployed against minorities at will. If only we could turn back time where surveillance of citizens and children wasn't the norm. 🙏 Perhaps a zoom meeting on how to help teens from people who REALLY care is needed. I could be dead wrong...FOMO ya'll.