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posted by martyb on Wednesday July 21 2021, @08:14AM   Printer-friendly

Over the weekend, an international consortium of news outlets reported that several authoritarian governments — including Mexico, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates — used spyware developed by NSO Group to hack into the phones of thousands of their most vocal critics, including journalists, activists, politicians and business executives.

A leaked list of 50,000 phone numbers of potential surveillance targets was obtained by Paris-based journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International and shared with the reporting consortium, including The Washington Post and The Guardian. Researchers analyzed the phones of dozens of victims to confirm they were targeted by the NSO's Pegasus spyware, which can access all of the data on a person's phone. The reports also confirm new details of the government customers themselves, which NSO Group closely guards. Hungary, a member of the European Union where privacy from surveillance is supposed to be a fundamental right for its 500 million residents, is named as an NSO customer.

The Mobile Verification Toolkit, or MVT, works on both iPhones and Android devices, but slightly differently. Amnesty said that more forensic traces were found on iPhones than Android devices, which makes it easier to detect on iPhones.

The toolkit works on the command line, so it's not a refined and polished user experience and requires some basic knowledge of how to navigate the terminal. We got it working in about 10 minutes, plus the time to create a fresh backup of an iPhone, which you will want to do if you want to check up to the hour.

TechCrunch

[Also Covered By]: GIZMODO


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @08:07PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @08:07PM (#1158884)

    Imagine being so innocent that you don't know the U.S. is using the same, or more advanced, tools against political dissidents in the U.S.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @08:38PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @08:38PM (#1158896)

    Imagine being so innocent that you don't know the U.S. is using the same

    you mean selling these tools to Algeria and Pakistan and the Saudis?

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @10:09PM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @10:09PM (#1158933)

      All Muslim countries... why would the US be helping its mortal enemies?

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @11:50PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @11:50PM (#1158966)

        You missed Mexico is on that list. In the frickin' summary, you didn't even need to RTFA to get that clue. There are more. More we know about today and more we will learn of. It is always this way, a constant drip of admissions, circling back and revising of past statements. They know the lies won't hold for long but since they never pay a price for being caught lying they keep doing it.

  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 22 2021, @01:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 22 2021, @01:02AM (#1158976)

    No that's not how it works. The rest of the 5-eyes spy on our citizens and we spy on their citizens. They then swap information. Avoids the legalities of spying on your own citizens.

  • (Score: 0, Offtopic) by khallow on Thursday July 22 2021, @12:13PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday July 22 2021, @12:13PM (#1159099) Journal
    The US is doing it too? Then I guess that makes it ok.

    We couldn't have a substantive discussion about this without a little whataboutism.