Security News
Facebook won a significant legal victory on Thursday when the judge hearing the lawsuit against Israeli spyware maker NSO Group declined to dismiss the case - and allowed the crucial discovery process to move forward. Last October, Facebook and its WhatsApp subsidiary sued NSO Group, and its Q Cyber Technologies affiliate, in the Northern District of California.
An Israeli court Monday rejected a bid by rights group Amnesty International to revoke the export license of spyware firm NSO Group over hacking allegations. NSO has faced multiple accusations of cyber-espionage on human rights activists and others, including by the messaging service WhatsApp, which is suing the company in a US court.
Google this week announced that, starting next month, an update to its policy will effectively result in the rejection of ads for surveillance technology. The updated Google Ads Enabling Dishonest Behavior policy, which will "Prohibit the promotion of products or services that are marketed or targeted with the express purpose of tracking or monitoring another person or their activities without their authorization," will be enforced starting August 11, 2020, the Internet giant announced.
Morocco's prime minister has demanded Amnesty International provide evidence to support its allegations that Rabat used spyware to bug a journalist's phone. Amnesty said in June the Moroccan authorities used software developed by Israeli security firm NSO to insert spyware onto the cellphone of Omar Radi, a journalist convicted in March over a social media post.
Researchers have uncovered a surveillance campaign, dating back to at least 2013, which has used a slew of Android surveillanceware tools to spy on the Uyghur ethnic minority group. Researchers say, the surveillance apps in the campaign were likely distributed through a combination of targeted phishing and fake third-party app stores - however, they fortunately haven't been discovered on official app marketplaces, like Google Play.
Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered new details of watering hole attacks against the Kurdish community in Syria and Turkey for surveillance and intelligence exfiltration purposes. The APT has been linked to a 2018 operation that abused Türk Telekom's network to redirect hundreds of users in Turkey and Syria to malicious StrongPity versions of authentic software.
Amnesty International said Monday that software developed by Israeli security firm NSO Group was used to attack a Moroccan journalist, the latest in a series of allegations against the company. Amnesty said the Moroccan authorities used NSO's Pegasus software to insert spyware onto the cellphone of Omar Radi, a journalist convicted in March over a social media post.
Finally, after years of states' use of this kind of powerful spyware against their rivals and political enemies, the US Congress is planning to order its Director of National Intelligence to keep track of the threat this malware poses to the nation, which foreign governments are using it, and for what. The Senate bill - which lays out funding for the government's intelligence operations for next year - would require the DNI to submit a report to Congress on the threat posed by commercial spyware.
In a paper recently published through the Journal of Cybersecurity, Cornell University assistant professor Karen Levy and security veteran Bruce Schneier argue that intimate relationships open the door to a set of privacy and security risks that haven't been anticipated or adequately addressed by the public, the technical community, and policymakers. "We describe privacy threats that arise in our intimate relationships: families, romances, friendships," said Levy.
According to an investigative journalist team, the Israeli authors of the infamous Pegasus mobile spyware, NSO Group, have been using a spoofed Facebook login page, crafted to look like an internal Facebook security team portal, to lure victims in. The news comes as Facebook alleges that NSO Group has been using U.S.-based infrastructure to launch espionage attacks.