Governments must impose a global moratorium on the international spyware trade or face a world in which no mobile phone is safe from state-sponsored hackers, Edward Snowden has warned in the wake of revelations about the clients of NSO Group.

Snowden, who in 2013 blew the whistle on the secret mass surveillance programmes of the US National Security Agency, described for-profit malware developers as “an industry that should not exist”.

He made the comments in an interview with the Guardian after the first revelations from the Pegasus project, a journalistic investigation by a consortium of international media organisations into the NSO Group and its clients.

[…]

For traditional police operations to plant bugs or wiretap a suspect’s phone, law enforcement would need to “break into somebody’s house, or go to their car, or go to their office, and we’d like to think they’ll probably get a warrant”, he said.

But commercial spyware made it cost-efficient for targeted surveillance against vastly more people. “If they can do the same thing from a distance, with little cost and no risk, they begin to do it all the time, against everyone who’s even marginally of interest,” he said.

“If you don’t do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it’s not just going to be 50,000 targets. It’s going to be 50 million targets, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect.”

Part of the problem arose from the fact that different people’s mobile phones were functionally identical to one another, he said. “When we’re talking about something like an iPhone, they’re all running the same software around the world. So if they find a way to hack one iPhone, they’ve found a way to hack all of them.”

He compared companies commercialising vulnerabilities in widely used mobile phone models to an industry of “infectioneers” deliberately trying to develop new strains of disease.

“It’s like an industry where the only thing they did was create custom variants of Covid to dodge vaccines,” he said. “Their only products are infection vectors. They’re not security products. They’re not providing any kind of protection, any kind of prophylactic. They don’t make vaccines – the only thing they sell is the virus.”

Snowden said commercial malware such as Pegasus was so powerful that ordinary people could in effect do nothing to stop it. Asked how people could protect themselves, he said: “What can people do to protect themselves from nuclear weapons?

“There are certain industries, certain sectors, from which there is no protection, and that’s why we try to limit the proliferation of these technologies. We don’t allow a commercial market in nuclear weapons.”

He said the only viable solution to the threat of commercial malware was an international moratorium on its sale. “What the Pegasus project reveals is the NSO Group is really representative of a new malware market, where this is a for-profit business,” he said. “The only reason NSO is doing this is not to save the world, it’s to make money.”

He said a global ban on the trade in infection vectors would prevent commercial abuse of vulnerabilities in mobile phones, while still allowing researchers to identify and fix them.

“The solution here for ordinary people is to work collectively. This is not a problem that we want to try and solve individually, because it’s you versus a billion dollar company,” he said. “If you want to protect yourself you have to change the game, and the way we do that is by ending this trade.”

[…]

Source: Edward Snowden calls for spyware trade ban amid Pegasus revelations | Edward Snowden | The Guardian

The revelation that our government might be using spyware called Pegasus to hack into its critics’ phones has started a whole new debate on privacy. The opposition is taking a dig at the ruling party every chance it gets, while the latter is trying to damage control after facing such serious allegations.

Amidst the chaos, one of the members of The Pegasus Project, Amnesty, recently made a public toolkit that can check if your phone is infected with Pegasus. The toolkit, known as MVT, requires users to know their way around the command line.

In a previous post, we wrote about how it works and successfully traces signs of Pegasus. Moreover, we mentioned how MVT is more effective on iOS than Android (the most you can do is scan APKs and SMSes). Hence, in this guide, we’re focusing on breaking down the process to detect Pegasus on iPhone into a step-by-step guide.

First off, you’ll need to create an encrypted backup and transfer it to either a Mac or PC. You can also do this on Linux instead, but you’ll have to install libimobiledevice beforehand for that.

Once the phone backup is transferred, you need to download Python 3.6 (or newer) on your system — if you don’t have it already. Here’s how you can install the same for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

After that, go through Amnesty’s manual to install MVT correctly on your system. Installing MVT will give you new utilities (mvt-ios and mvt-android) that you can use in the Python command line.

Now, let’s go through the steps for detecting Pegasus on an iPhone backup using MVT.

Steps To Detect Pegasus On iPhone

First of all, you have to decrypt your data backup. To do that, you’ll need to enter the following instruction format while replacing the placeholder text (marked with a forward slash) with your custom path.

mvt-ios decrypt-backup -p password -d /decrypted /backup

Note: Replace “/decrypted” with the directory where you want to store the decrypted backup and “/backup” with the directory where your encrypted backup is located.

Now, we will run a scan on the decrypted backup, referencing it with the latest IOCs (possible signs of Pegasus spyware), and store the result in an output folder.

To do this, first, download the newest IOCs from here (use the folder with the latest timestamp). Then, enter the instruction format as given below with your custom directory path.

mvt-ios check-backup -o /output -i /pegasus.stix2 /backup

Note: Replace “/output” with the directory where you want to store the scan result, “/backup” with the path where your decrypted backup is stored, and “/pegasus.stix2” with the path where you downloaded the latest IOCs.

After the scan completion, MVT will generate JSON files in the specified output folder. If there is a JSON file with the suffix “_detected,” then that means your iPhone data is most likely Pegasus-infected.

However, the IOCs are regularly updated by Amnesty’s team as they develop a better understanding of how Pegasus operates. So, you might want to keep running scans as the IOCs are updated to make sure there are no false positives.

Source: How To Check If Your Phone Is Infected With Pegasus Using MVT

Billions of people are inseparable from their phones. Their devices are within reach – and earshot – for almost every daily experience, from the most mundane to the most intimate.

Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time.

Such are the capabilities of Pegasus, the spyware manufactured by NSO Group, the Israeli purveyor of weapons of mass surveillance.

NSO rejects this label. It insists only carefully vetted government intelligence and law enforcement agencies can use Pegasus, and only to penetrate the phones of “legitimate criminal or terror group targets”.

Yet in the coming days the Guardian will be revealing the identities of many innocent people who have been identified as candidates for possible surveillance by NSO clients in a massive leak of data.

Without forensics on their devices, we cannot know whether governments successfully targeted these people. But the presence of their names on this list indicates the lengths to which governments may go to spy on critics, rivals and opponents.

First we reveal how journalists across the world were selected as potential targets by these clients prior to a possible hack using NSO surveillance tools.

Over the coming week we will be revealing the identities of more people whose phone numbers appear in the leak. They include lawyers, human rights defenders, religious figures, academics, businesspeople, diplomats, senior government officials and heads of state.

Our reporting is rooted in the public interest. We believe the public should know that NSO’s technology is being abused by the governments who license and operate its spyware. But we also believe it is in the public interest to reveal how governments look to spy on their citizens and how seemingly benign processes such as HLR lookups can be exploited in this environment.

[…]

Companies such as NSO operate in a market that is almost entirely unregulated, enabling tools that can be used as instruments of repression for authoritarian regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

The market for NSO-style surveillance-on-demand services has boomed post-Snowden, whose revelations prompted the mass adoption of encryption across the internet. As a result the internet became far more secure, and mass harvesting of communications much more difficult.

But that in turn spurred the proliferation of companies such as NSO offering solutions to governments struggling to intercept messages, emails and calls in transit. The NSO answer was to bypass encryption by hacking devices.

Two years ago the then UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, called for a moratorium on the sale of NSO-style spyware to governments until viable export controls could be put in place. He warned of an industry that seemed “out of control, unaccountable and unconstrained in providing governments with relatively low-cost access to the sorts of spying tools that only the most advanced state intelligence services were previously able to use”.

His warnings were ignored. The sale of surveillance continued unabated. That GCHQ-like surveillance tools are now available for purchase by repressive governments may give some of Snowden’s critics pause for thought.

[…]

Source: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance | Surveillance | The Guardian

[…]

Watkins, a self-described privacy advocate whose mother and grandmother shredded personal information when he was growing up, said he is unwilling to complete the identity verification process his state now requires, which includes having his face analyzed by a little-known company called ID.me.

He sent a sharply worded letter to his state’s unemployment agency criticizing ID.me’s service, saying he would not take part in it given his privacy concerns. In response, he received an automated note from the agency: “If you do not verify your identity soon, your claim will be disqualified and no further benefit payments will be issued.” (A spokesperson for the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment said the agency only allows manual identity verification “as a last resort” for unemployment claimants who are under 18 — because ID.me doesn’t work with minors — and those who have “technological barriers.”)

[…]

Watkins is one of millions across the United States who are being instructed to use ID.me, along with its facial recognition software, to get their unemployment benefits. A rapidly growing number of US states, including Colorado, California and New York, turned to ID.me in hopes of cutting down on a surge of fraudulent claims for state and federal benefits that cropped up during the pandemic alongside a tidal wave of authentic unemployment claims.

As of this month, 27 states’ unemployment agencies had entered contracts with ID.me, according to the company, with 25 of them already using its technology. ID.me said it is in talks with seven more. ID.me also verifies user identities for numerous federal agencies, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, Social Security Administration and IRS.

[…]

The face-matching technology ID.me employs comes from a San Francisco-based startup called Paravision

[…]

Facial recognition technology, in general, is contentious. Civil rights groups frequently oppose it for privacy issues and other potential dangers. For instance, it has been shown to be less accurate when identifying people of color, and several Black men, at least, have been wrongfully arrested due to the use of facial recognition. It’s barely regulated — there are no federal laws governing its use, though some states and local governments have passed their own rules to limit or prohibit its use. Despite these concerns, the technology has been used across the US federal government, as a June report from the Government Accountability Office showed.

Several ID.me users told CNN Business about problems they had verifying their identities with the company, which ranged from the facial recognition technology failing to recognize their face to waiting for hours to reach a human for a video chat after encountering problems with the technology. A number of people who claim to have had issues with ID.me have taken to social media to beg the company for help with verification, express their own concerns about its face-data collection or simply rant, often in response to ID.me’s own posts on Twitter. And some like Watkins are simply frustrated not to have a say in the matter.

[…]

ID.me said it does not sell user data — which includes biometric and related information such as selfies people upload, data related to facial analyses, and recordings of video chats users participate in with ID.me — but it does keep it. Biometric data, like the facial geometry produced from a user’s selfie, may be kept for years after a user closes their account.

Hall said ID.me keeps this information only for auditing purposes, particularly for government agencies in cases of fraud or identity theft. Users, according to its privacy policy, can ask ID.me to delete personally identifiable information it has gathered from them, but the company “may keep track of certain information if required by law” and may not be able to “completely delete” all user information since it “periodically” backs up such data. (As Ryan Calo, codirector of the University of Washington’s Tech Policy Lab, put it, this data retention policy is “pretty standard,” but, he added, that “doesn’t make it great!”)

[…]

Beyond state unemployment agencies, ID.me is also becoming more widespread among federal agencies such as the IRS, which in June began using ID.me to verify identities of people who want to use its Child Tax Credit Update Portal.

“We’re verifying more than 1% of the American adult population each quarter, and that’s starting to compress more to like 45 or 50 days,” Hall said. The company has more than 50 million users, he said, and signs up more than 230,000 new ones each day.

[…]

Vasquez said that, when a state chooses to use a tool it knows has a tendency to not work as well on some people, she thinks that “starts to invade something more than privacy and get at questions of what society values and how it values different members’ work and what our society believes about dignity.”

Hall claims ID.me’s facial recognition software is over 99% accurate and said an internal test conducted on hundreds of faces of people who had failed to pass the facial recognition check for logging in to the social security website did not show statistically significant evidence of racial bias.

In cases where users are able to opt out of the ID.me process, it can still be arduous and time-consuming: California’s Employment Development Department website, for instance, instructs people who can’t verify their identity via ID.me when applying online to file their claim over the phone or by mail or fax.

Most people aren’t doing this, however; it’s time consuming to deal with snail mail or wade through EDD’s phone system, and many people don’t have access to a fax machine. An EDD spokesperson said that such manual identity verification, which used to be a “significant” part of EDD’s backlog, now accounts for “virtually none” of it.

Long wait times for some

Eighty-five percent of people are able to verify their identity with ID.me immediately for state workforce agencies without needing to go through a video chat, Hall said.

What happens to the remaining 15% worries Akselrod, of the ACLU, since users must have access to a device with a camera — like a smartphone or computer — as well as decent internet access. According to recent Pew research, 15% of American adults surveyed don’t have a smartphone and 23% don’t have home broadband.

“These technologies may be inaccessible for precisely the people for whom access to unemployment insurance is the most critical,” Akselrod said.

[…]

Source: Want your unemployment benefits? You may have to submit to facial recognition first – CNN

What this excellent article doesn’t go into is what a terrible idea having huge centralised databases is, especially one filled with biometric information (which you can’t change) of an entire population

A series of Samsung apps that allow customers to control their internet-connected appliances require access to all the phone’s contacts and, in some cases, the phone call app, phone’s location, and camera. Customers have been furious about this for years.

On Wednesday, a Reddit user complained that their washing machine app, the Samsung Smart Washer, wouldn’t work “unless I give it access to my contacts, location and camera.”

This is a common complaint.

[…]

These situations speak to two issues: Apps that demand permissions that they don’t need, and “smart” and internet of things devices that make formerly simple tasks very complicated, and open up potential privacy and security concerns.

Generally speaking, over the last few years, people have become more sensitive to what they’re giving up in privacy and potentially security when they deal with big tech companies. Smart TVs (Samsung included), for example, have been caught listening to users and automatically deliver ads. Tech companies have had to adapt and do better. For example, both Apple and Google allow users to see what data an app has access to, and in some cases users can toggle the permissions individually. The upcoming new version of Android will even have a dedicated “Privacy Dashboard” where users can see which apps used what permissions, and revoke them if they want. Apple’s iOS has similar functionality. But none of this stops app developers from asking users to accept unnecessary permissions.

It’s unclear why apps that are designed to let you set the type of washing cycle you want, or see how long it’s gonna take for the dryer to be done, would need access to your phone’s contacts. In an FAQ for another Samsung app, the company says it needs access to contacts “to check if you already have a Samsung account set up in your device. Knowing this information helps mySamsung to make the sign-in process seamless.”

[…]

Source: Samsung Washing Machine App Requires Access to Your Contacts and Location

Federal law enforcement agencies secretly seek the data of Microsoft customers thousands of times a year, according to congressional testimony Wednesday by a senior executive at the technology company.

Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for customer security and trust, told members of the House Judiciary Committee that federal law enforcement in recent years has been presenting the company with between 2,400 to 3,500 secrecy orders a year, or about seven to 10 a day.

“Most shocking is just how routine secrecy orders have become when law enforcement targets an American’s email, text messages or other sensitive data stored in the cloud,” said Burt, describing the widespread clandestine surveillance as a major shift from historical norms.

[…]

Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, called for an end to the overuse of secret gag orders, arguing in a Washington Post opinion piece that “prosecutors too often are exploiting technology to abuse our fundamental freedoms.” Attorney General Merrick Garland, meanwhile, has said the Justice Department will abandon its practice of seizing reporter records and will formalize that stance soon.

[…]

Burt said that while the revelation that federal prosecutors had sought data about journalists and political figures was shocking to many Americans, the scope of surveillance is much broader. He criticized prosecutors for reflexively seeking secrecy through boilerplate requests that “enable law enforcement to just simply assert a conclusion that a secrecy order is necessary.”

[…]

As possible solutions, Burt said, the government should end indefinite secrecy orders and should also be required to notify the target of the data demand once the secrecy order has expired.

Just this week, he said, prosecutors sought a blanket gag order affecting the government of a major U.S. city for a Microsoft data request targeting a single employee there.

“Without reform, abuses will continue to occur and they will occur in the dark,” Burt said.

Source: Microsoft exec: Targeting of Americans’ records ‘routine’