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- Hacker News
- Y'all will be shocked at how much of the VPN space is owned/controlled by Israel.by karim79
- This is even crazier than the last time Citizen Lab found an Israeli zero-click spyware (Pegasus). You could call it a sequelby schleck8
- It's really sad this got taken off the front page (347 points, posted 2 hours ago at the time of this comment). Israel is deeply intertwined with the tech industry and they use tech extensively in extremely hostile ways. It's relevant to this site discussion and the votes demonstrate that. There's no reason to hide the elephant in the room, let's address it, now is the time.by slowin
- It is standard that companies within a country act in the interests of its security services. Israel has a lot of ad-tech companies and thus it makes sense that they are roped into serving Israel's security services.
It is no different that Israel's location tracking of StarLink terminals worldwide: https://www.newarab.com/news/israel-tech-firms-can-locate-an...
This is the same issue that the US government has with Chinese networking companies, it is too easy for the Chinese government to pressure these Chinese networking companies to put in back doors in the interests of national security. The US likely knows this because it pressures its own companies in similar ways.
by bhouston - Turns out Google killing Android privacy was completely useless as a way to prevent people from being hacked, but they might use this type of stuff to justify even more closing of supposedly "free" paltforms.
Likewise, using privacy messengers like Signal is also useless if they can just take control of your entire device anytime they want.
by andunie - AdTech engineer here (some 13 years in the industry). A couple of notes:
- The report is highly sensationalist in the "zero-click" aspect. It details to some degree the aspects of distribution and C&C but goes very vague the main point - what was the mechanism that activated that zero malware in a zero-click fashion.
- To the point below that "ad providers should be held responsible." There is no such thing as "ad provider." The AdTech ecosystem is teeming with different niches and business models - see the famous LUMAscapes diagrams: https://lumapartners.com/lumascapes/ . The sheer volume of traffic makes it virtually impossible to vet even a fraction of it. Google has thrown a lot of compute power to pre-scan 3p creatives and even then bad actors can sneak through. Add to this a lot of sophistication on their side (from different landing pages based on the perception of the type of user to farming throw-away advertiser accounts aimed at running just one campaign like that to hijacking legit accounts through sophisticated technical and people engineering means). In the end, politicians full of indignation do what politicians always do - sue or fine Google and call it a victory, whereas the true bad actors just keep going.
by Postosuchus - OK, I read the report, but I'm still not clear on what the browser vulnerability is. This clearly seems like something browser vendors should be able to patch, correct?
The article does say "Both samples use a COM hijack for persistence, though make use of different DLLs." So does this only affect Windows machines? I didn't have time to read the linked 2021 report on Candiru, so maybe more details are there, but for such a detailed write up it would be helpful if the article was more explicit about which browser vulnerability was exploited.
- My question is, why is Israel so good at this? It seems to be at least the 4th cyber power of the world, after the US, Russia and China, if not actually on par or better.
I guess it is because it has been under the threat of larger enemies from its birth, so it must leverage whatever it has to survive. And once you grow an organization and let it loose, you don't have much control over it anymore, and it grows in the wild like a flower.
by ferguess_k