Whatsapp Attributes Hack of 1,400 Users to NSO Group Technology
citizenlab.ca
citizenlab.ca
If I were an NSO Group employee, I would think twice before entering the United States, let alone venturing outside of Israel.
They most probably won’t.
Edit: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/3kxk9j/dea-didnt-buy-malw...
The Drug Enforcement Administration would have bought NSO's software, but it was too expensive.
I fully expect that NSO will be allowed to act with impunity. If anyone in the US government tries to stop them, AIPAC would pull all their campaign funding from the Repubs or Dems (whichever party's lackey did it) and they'd never get elected again.
This is a pretty interesting comment because AIPAC does not even contribute directly to any candidates but it is the center of MANY conspiracy theories. I'm not going to downplay the lobbying but let us actually look at the numbers, first individuals:
>Though AIPAC as an organization cannot contribute to campaigns, individuals who work for the organization have. In the 2018 election cycle, individuals affiliated with the organization donated just $21,350 to 14 different candidates, nine of whom were Democrats. No one associated with AIPAC gave any contributions to McCarthy.
Not that much and I doubt it would break any campaign if they stopped. But let's see how much the organization actually donated:
>AIPAC is a significant player in terms of lobbying, accounting for the vast majority of lobbying spending by pro-Israel groups, spending more than $3.5 million in 2018. The organization was staunchly opposed to the Iran Nuclear Deal in 2015, lobbied extensively against it and supported the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the agreement.
Ok, 3.5 million dollars is a lot of money but let us compare them to ...let's say Google who spent over 21 million that year or any of the top 20 or so it is small potatoes.
https://www.opensecrets.org/federal-lobbying/top-spenders?cy...
It is interesting how people seem to think them so powerful when they don't actually spend that much in comparison and that while of course they are successful a lot of politics align with very strong American groups (Evangelicals who are very strong Trump supporters want the embassy in Jerusalem, Neocons and other remains hate Iran etc.)
The NSO needs to get an export permit for every sale, if you think the US doesn’t have oversight over this you are fooling yourself.
This won’t lead to anything because it would set a horrible precedence which US defense contractors would not ever allow.
(And then, from history: the exploit is promptly stolen from them by about 11 different adversaries, but it's only fixed when some government contractors antivirus uploads their zero day because it matched some sort of heuristic. Occasionally, before this last step happens, the exploits are uploaded to GitHub when a ransom demand runs out.)
If any NSO/NSA employee is reading, is this the kind of oppression you want your talents to aid? Pimping your mom, sister or wife to your country's leaders could be a better job.
[0]: https://scroll.in/latest/942218/nagpur-lawyer-notified-by-wh...
It's not a good sign when FB is unwilling to take responsibility for the mess they've made. How can anyone trust this company ever again?
Unfortunately, I think if they can win the PR war then they'll probably be fine. At this point the only thing that matters is public perception, and the one thing FB has going for it is that many people don't even realize that Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram are all the same company.
Facebook shipped a product with a security bug. There's nothing unusual about this. Every software with non-trivial functionality has, or has had at some point in the past, many security bugs.
What exactly is the scandal, here? Why are you holding Facebook to a standard that no other company, or open source project is able to meet?
Instead they allocate most of their resources into figuring out how to get people to click on ads.