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Title    The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon
Date    Tuesday February 08 2022, @05:47AM
Author    Fnord666
Topic   
from the dept.
https://soylentnews.org/politics/article.pl?sid=22/02/06/1642224

upstart writes:

The Battle for the World's Most Powerful Cyberweapon [Ed's Comment: If paywalled try https://archive.fo/cbnUR]

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.

[...] As part of their training, F.B.I. employees bought new smartphones at local stores and set them up with dummy accounts, using SIM cards from other countries — Pegasus was designed to be unable to hack into American numbers. Then the Pegasus engineers, as they had in previous demonstrations around the world, opened their interface, entered the number of the phone and began an attack.

[...] Ever since the 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor, about U.S. government surveillance of American citizens, few debates in this country have been more fraught than those over the proper scope of domestic spying. Questions about the balance between privacy and security took on new urgency with the parallel development of smartphones and spyware that could be used to scoop up the terabytes of information those phones generate every day. Israel, wary of angering Americans by abetting the efforts of other countries to spy on the United States, had required NSO to program Pegasus so it was incapable of targeting U.S. numbers. This prevented its foreign clients from spying on Americans. But it also prevented Americans from spying on Americans.

NSO had recently offered the F.B.I. a workaround. During a presentation to officials in Washington, the company demonstrated a new system, called Phantom, that could hack any number in the United States that the F.B.I. decided to target. Israel had granted a special license to NSO, one that permitted its Phantom system to attack U.S. numbers. The license allowed for only one type of client: U.S. government agencies. A slick brochure put together for potential customers by NSO's U.S. subsidiary, first published by Vice, says that Phantom allows American law enforcement and spy agencies to get intelligence "by extracting and monitoring crucial data from mobile devices." It is an "independent solution" that requires no cooperation from AT&T, Verizon, Apple or Google. The system, it says, will "turn your target's smartphone into an intelligence gold mine."

[...] The discussions at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. continued until last summer, when the F.B.I. finally decided not to deploy the NSO weapons. It was around this time that a consortium of news organizations called Forbidden Stories brought forward new revelations about NSO cyberweapons and their use against journalists and political dissidents. The Pegasus system currently lies dormant at the facility in New Jersey.

[...] In November, the United States announced what appeared — at least to those who knew about its previous dealings — to be a complete about-face on NSO. The Commerce Department was adding the Israeli firm to its "entity list" for activities "contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States." The list, originally designed to prevent U.S. companies from selling to nations or other entities that might be in the business of manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, had in recent years come to include several cyberweapons companies. NSO could no longer buy critical supplies from American firms.

Previously on SN:


Original Submission

Links

  1. "upstart" - https://soylentnews.org/~upstart/
  2. "The Battle for the World's Most Powerful Cyberweapon" - https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/magazine/nso-group-israel-spyware.html
  3. "first published by Vice" - https://www.vice.com/en/article/8899nz/nso-group-pitched-phone-hacking-tech-american-police
  4. "The Commerce Department was adding the Israeli firm to its "entity list"" - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/business/nso-group-spyware-blacklist.html
  5. "FBI Admits it Acquired NSO's Pegasus Spyware in 2019" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=22/02/03/1326241
  6. "Researchers Call NSO Zero-Click iPhone Exploit "Incredible and Terrifying"" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/12/18/1959236
  7. "American Diplomats' iPhones Reportedly Compromised by NSO Group Intrusion Software" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/12/06/2040255
  8. "Apple Sues NSO Group for Providing Software to Hack iPhones" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/11/24/1213251
  9. "U.S. Places Sanctions on NSO Group, Peddler of Pegasus Spyware" - https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/11/06/0545234
  10. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=53635

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printed from SoylentNews, The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon on 2024-03-29 15:27:31