A Grad Student Found Spyware That Could Control Anybody’s iPhone | Hacker News Reader

A Grad Student Found Spyware That Could Control Anybody’s iPhone

vanityfair.com

42 pointsIncitatous17 comments

"nearly 1,400 lines of multicolored commands in seemingly random order, tossed about like a salad." oh geez, really?

Yep, and then:

"Suddenly lines of colorful computer code began manically unspooling down his screen: a view of the alien code invading the phone."

Orson Welles and his War of the Worlds was a kid in comparison.

One part hollywood, two parts liberal arts major...

Long winded prose. Description of beards and an attempt to give the whole thing a 007 spin.

Tldr; suspected government grade spyware originating from Israeli company NSO used to trap dissidents in Arab countries, targeting the iPhone (iOS 9) and utilising 2 or 3 zero days to jailbreak the device and snoop on everything it can.

Would have been nice to read some technical details but there are none, and the piece goes on forever, needlessly.

there you go: http://info.lookout.com/rs/051-ESQ-475/images/lookout-pegasu...

Thats the article that should have been posted. Scary that this is an actual company that built this complex spyware. Given that their customers are nation-states you could consider these folks to be a terrorist organization.

Also shows you how hard it is to build secure systems, you have to be perfect and the attacker only has to be persistent and succeed once.

Maybe a mod could change the article link to this?

Yeah, this wasn't written for the nerds.

Original Link

http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/how-bill-marczak-spyw...

If Android/IOS can be modified such that all apps are always place under docker style container/VM, would it help?

a kernel exploit doesn't help you much with a docker style container. Also docker is not a VM. And iOS/Android are already way better with sandboxing than our desktop environments.

For Kernel exploit, probably be true.

If one becomes root in a docker container, the worst damage it can do is to that container's files. That is better the current "sandboxing" in iOS/Android setup, true?

Thank you! That's awesome

Funny Israeli company helping Arab governments crack down on dissidents. Money. It brings the whole world together.

Its a social studies article masking as a tech article because iPhone.

Its what you get when hipsters think they are hot shit with tech because they own something Apple made.

As far as I understand the article was written by:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryan_Burrough

Yes, he is not a technology writer. But it's also obvious that the technology specialists weren't the target audience of this article.

It is surely not easy read for us who expect to read the technical info, and who already know most of the context.

the problem is having it posted to Hackernews. who here reads vanity fair ? :P

but let the normies have their day in the sun! not all hipsters are bad and i guess someone out there did enjoy the readup. i'd really wish these things weren't posted to HN though.

hipsters are like teenage sex. everyone talks about it and makes fun of it but it dorsnt really exist.

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