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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.
[Also Covered By]: GIZMODO
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @08:11PM (3 children)
It really isn't optional anymore. Either Pine or the Librum are the only options at this point. A "Degoogled" eBay special clunker is a distant second because you still don't get access to the modem side. Pinephone is doing an early access (i.e. for the brave or developers) to an almost entirely open stack in the modem itself, including a mainline kernel. A few blobs will remain for the DSP, nobody is insane enough to want to monkey around with the actual radio. But embedding spyware into the modem should be pretty impractical with everything else compiled by the community.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday July 21 2021, @10:13PM (2 children)
Yes, Pinephone and Librem are attractive, mainly for Linux interperability, but also for some modicum of privacy and security.
On my phone I use several features that as far as I know are not part of the usual GNU/Linux systems:
(1) make and receive phone calls, of course (I presume these phones can do this)
(2) Facebook Messenger Lite -- for which I'll need a to interoperate.
(3) SMS messaging (probably present on both phones)
(4) cashing cheques by photographing them using my bank's app.
Any idea how (2) and (4) can be done on the Pinephone or Librem?
-- hendrik
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @10:59PM
The inability of Pinephone and Librem to communicate with other phones is paramount to their security.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 21 2021, @11:46PM
If you can't use Fakebook through a browser or PWA you would be out of luck. But since any "app" for it is almost infested spyware, this is part of the plan.
You will never have banking apps on any device the powers that be do not own. You seem to be missing the whole point.
And yes, Pinephone does SMS pretty solid, calls is 90% there and MMS support is rolling out through the various distros now. Wifi and 4G data are also dependable. Both Firefox and Chromium are available for browsing. Everything is still very alpha though. Depending on which distro you boot you might not even have a viable notepad, todo or calendar yet. Development is at a furious pace though. If you want to experience a ground floor Linux, buy a Pinephone. It is like 1994 all over again. We know how that ended up, fairly confident this also ends up with something short of world domination but close enough for our needs.