Hacker News Reader

Comment by bee_rider | Hacker News Reader

There’s a reddit thread by somebody who got one of these:

https://old.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1c10jai/i_have_rece...

The interesting thing IMO is they claim to just be some random college student. Which seems believable because if they were a real secret squirrel I guess they wouldn’t ask reddit about it, haha.

I wonder if the hackers are targeting people based on phone numbers or something. (I could imagine a college student recently getting a new number and ending up with one that’d been associated with a target—I guess? Although you’d hope there’d be a way to retire numbers that are known to be targets).

View on HN

"random college student"

I think there's a misunderstanding on what constitutes a valid or ideal target for state sponsored (or "mercenary") attackers. Simply working at a research lab, industrial manufacturer, power station, tech company or knowing a certain professor can put you on a target list.

Well dang I work in a research lab and I didn’t get an email.

I’m just going to assume my research is so interesting that they sent the real badasses after me, somebody that Apple can’t catch. The truth is too ego-shattering.

Look to your left. Look to your right.

Both of those people are working for a foreign government.

At least one of them does not know it.

Trust no one.

This comment has an off-by-one error.

If this is sarcasm, I love it. If you're serious then I don't.

I think it must be, it is a re-spin of a common “toxic STEM professor” meme.

It's a story told to first-year law students: Look to your left, look to your right, only one of you three will become a lawyer.

The first day at university in the 80s, Computer Science, the head of faculty told us that stats were that only 30% made it to graduation and started walking in front of the first row of the hall. “You will graduate, you won't, you won't. You will graduate, you won't, you won't." Motivational speech or not, at least half of the students dropped out in the first two years. The goal of those two years seemed to be right that: convincing people to leave. Then it got easier and more interesting.

Similar experience in EE, the first year requirements were full of "filter" or "weed-out" courses in math and physics.

The generous argument is that it's only fair to the student that they should know quickly whether they'll be able to get through the material. Failing fast can be merciful.

The truth is probably more complicated. Let's just say that the student population ended up looking a lot like the TA and professor population. Lather, rinse, repeat.

You probably have been targeted with the more advanced spyware that Apple hasn’t detected yet. ;)

For now

So may different ways to read that, haha

NSO was targeting something like 40k people just in mexico. It's entirely possible that this was an accidental targeting because they have a similar name or email to a target.

I found this email from Apple in my inbox too. At first I thought it was spam.

The only thing I can think why I could possibly be targeted is that I mentioned on a few Youtube channels about the clearly obvious IDF troll armies spamming the comments of any YT news stories which highlighted the atrocities (as well as mentioning when the troll armies seemed to stop their operations dramatically last week when the World Kitchen aid workers were killed and the news exploded around it).

Lockdown mode now enabled.

My next question would be "What do your immediate relatives and friends do, or what are they involved with?"

It could also be an accidental misidentification - maybe OP has the same name as someone they actually wanted to target, or their phone number or email address is very similar to someone they wanted to target.

Or, it could be an intentional misidentification - maybe OP has a friend who was picked up by whatever east european security services, and provided OPs name as some kind of co-conspirator in something OP's friend was into.

Well the they might be just a college student, but they could have a relationship with the actual target in some way. And if it's part of a complex operation they could be trying some indirect approaches.

Or maybe have a bigger blast radius so that it is difficult to know the exact targets. Drown the detection algos in the noise.

Exactly. If you're identifying targets by noisy proxy signals (geo/IP + behavior?) then you're going to have non-zero false positives.

> Well the they might be just a college student, but they could have a relationship with the actual target in some way.

People who are "just" college students often are the sons and daughters of people who could be targeted. Not to mention people in their social circles.

If you want to get someone to click a link or open a photo/video having it sent to them by their nanny for example would seem pretty effective.

Everyone's thinking academic secrets but have they engaged in activism in any way shape or form?

Being able to take activists and discredit them is an amazing ability. I would not at all be surprised if the xz compression backdoor was an attempt by a certain government to gain the ability to discredit anyone that is against them in anyway.

College students are a traditional target of oppressive or authoritarian regimes. Teaching young adults to view the world through different lenses and systems is an important part of most college programs, as is a significant amount of self-discovery, and both lend themselves very well to activism, especially since young adults are rarely so jaded as to feel like they "can't do anything about it"

How often is that being done in the modern age of social media? I don't think "activists" are very important or dangerous to governments anywhere.

Having wrote an article on XZ, I was half expecting to have this text popup, especially as I'm fairly certain i was targeted by a misinformation campaign already

what activists are running sshd?

Many software freedom and tech privacy activists.

That person already got targeted last summer. I doubt they are as uninteresting as they believe/claim to be.

You'd be surprised. A college student in an interesting field is an interesting target. Doesn't mean he's done anything nefarious or even shady.

Industrial espionage is a thing.

Why would a college student be an interesting target simply for being a college student in an interesting field? If they work at an interesting company or something like that I would understand, but the knowledge that is accessible in colleges is not some super secret stuff or am I missing something?

The conversation here is focussing on industrial espionage, but that's only one use case for this kind of active measure. An association with an opposition political party could easily get one on a surveillance list.

Yep, imagine an international postgrad student from an NSO client-state who criticizes their home country's leadership online, or is perceived to be a political activist is likely to be targeted by their own government for additional on-device monitoring via spyware. This could provide a springboard into monitoring other groups the victim may be a member of.

We've had this problem quite a bit in Australia.

Chinese students attending protests have had their families back home warned.

Personally know friends this has happened to.

Colleges are basically outsourced green field R&D setup through professors as well as Patent departments to monetize their internal/grant research spend.. Sampling in a large company what you would happen upon is mundane additions to complex solutions you would be unlikely to want to copy if you weren't along for the earlier parts of the ride.

They are gullible and they need the money.

Student debts are a harsh reality a lot of people cannot escape from.

It doesn't take much to be a target. CIA spy maybe not, but the net is wide when it comes to surveillance. Infrastructure providers, higher education, research labs are all common targets.

>It doesn't take much to be a target.

I wonder how to quantify this. Even folks in those industries listed while there may be reason we could imagine to target them... I would imagine lots of folks in those same industries are NOT targeted.

Of course we'd have to identify "targeted", personally I wouldn't include "your name ended up on a list after someone grepped a bunch of data". I would think of as targeted as a more curated type list / process / and then the call was made to "target" someone.

Otherwise, heck random scanning on the internet would be "targeted".

It could be that they’re related to a target. I’ve done a lot of hobby OSINT and sometimes finding a target is using off-center targeting to effectively triangulate or pivot.

In that thread someone asserted he received the first message after traveling to/through Cyprus

E: Thread: https://old.reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1c10jai/i_have_rece...

There's some significant geopolitical intrigue surrounding Cyprus -- probably the most obvious are its partition between between Turkey and Greece and its use as a tax haven by Russian oligarchs.

There's also "equipment" on Cyprus. I know a fiber-optic specialist who spent some time there working on a Five Eyes project for the UK.

See, e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrotiri_and_Dhekelia

A government that stoops to civil rights crimes but doesn't attach a good percentage of its fear to student movements is kind of oblivious to history as it pertains to its own miserable survival.

It's fairly common practice to test out exploits on victims that aren't the actual target first.

Uh, no?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com