Egyptian presidential hopeful targeted by Predator spyware

washingtonpost.com

22 points·ComputerGuru··5 comments

> While Citizen Lab did not allege that Vodafone was complicit in the attack, Marczak said that the “easiest” way to install PacketLogic on the Vodafone network would be with Vodafone’s cooperation.

Vodafone Egypt already does packet sniffing to block all VPN traffic, even for more guarded protocols such as WireGuard. So yes, this is not a stretch. (source: Myself, an Egyptian)

All Egyptian telcos are basically state-run even if they're not listed as state owned. iirc all network infrastructure is leased from TEData (TE = Telecom Egypt) and so they have the ability to block arbitrary ip addresses or mitm traffic.

A side effect of this is that there's no real competition between ISPs in Egypt, since theyre all forced to lease the same infrastructure at the same rates, and are forbidden from building their own. I'm a little salty about this fact, since it's the reason why I could only get a 2Mbit connection to my old apartment until I moved abroad.

This ties in to the very active front page discussion about the zero day being exploited in Egypt and answers some of the questions raised in the thread about who was behind it and who was being targeted.

0-days exploited by commercial surveillance vendor in Egypt - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37614816 - Sept 2023 (231 comments)

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