Government Hackers Caught Using Unprecedented iPhone Spy Tool

lotuseclat79 · Aug 25, 2016

Government Hackers Caught Using Unprecedented iPhone Spy Tool

On the morning of August 10, Ahmed Mansoor, a 46-year-old human rights activist from the United Arab Emirates, received a strange text message from a number he did not recognize on his iPhone.

“New secrets about torture of Emiratis in state prisons," read the tantalizing message, which came accompanied by a link.

Mansoor, who had already been the victim of government hackers using commercial spyware products from FinFisher and Hacking Team, was suspicious and didn’t click on the link. Instead, he sent the message to Bill Marczak, a researcher at Citizen Lab, a digital rights watchdog at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs.

As it turned out, the message wasn’t what it purported to be. The link didn’t lead to any secrets, but to a sophisticated piece of malware that exploited three different unknown vulnerabilities in Apple’s iOS operating system that would have allowed the attackers to get full control of Mansoor’s iPhone, according to new joint reports released on Thursday by Citizen Lab and mobile security company Lookout.

This is the first time that anyone has uncovered such an attack in the wild. Until this month, no one had seen an attempted spyware infection leveraging three unknown bugs, or zero-days, in the iPhone. The tools and technology needed for such an attack, which is essentially a remote jailbreak of the iPhone, can be worth as much as one million dollars. After the researchers alerted Apple, the company worked quickly to fix them in an update released on Thursday.

...

“We realized that we were looking at something that no one had ever seen in the wild before. Literally a click on a link to jailbreak an iPhone in one step,” Murray told Motherboard. “One of the most sophisticated pieces of cyberespionage software we’ve ever seen.”
Click to expand...

-- Tom

lotuseclat79 · Aug 25, 2016

Meet NSO Group, The New Big Player in The Government Spyware Business

On Thursday, a group of malware hunters revealed that it had caught an incredibly sophisticated and rare piece of spyware: surveillance software that leveraged three previously unknown flaws in the iPhone’s operating system to give hackers complete control of the target device.
Click to expand...

-- Tom

Reality · Aug 25, 2016

Thanks for posting. Very scary. Glad I don't have an iphone but after reading this sort of thing it makes you wonder what actually IS safe.

BoerenkoolMetWorst · Aug 25, 2016

Article from the ones who discovered it:
https://citizenlab.org/2016/08/million-dollar-dissident-iphone-zero-day-nso-group-uae/

lotuseclat79 · Aug 26, 2016

Here’s what we know about the secretive company building terrifying tools to hack your iPhone

Here's what we know so far.
Click to expand...

-- Tom

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