this post was submitted on 06 Jul 2023
725 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
58138 readers
4984 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How is this even feasible on Android or iPhones? Are they going to force everyone to download Team Viewer or something?
Usually with Pegasus. And yes it works. Don't ask about it.
[https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/jul/18/what-is-pegasus-spyware-and-how-does-it-hack-phones](Well crap. We’re fucked then?)
Well crap, we're fucked then?
Title then link
We are just as fucked as we’ve always been. Hackers use zero-day vulnerabilities. Can’t do too much about that. Any device is hackable. That became clear after Snowden, and the USA hacking irans centrifuge.
The US hacking Iran's centrifuges would have been preventable though with careful device management as far as I understand. The worm they used, Stuxnet, didn't come from nowhere. It either came from a USB that hadn't been properly sanitized or their systems were connected to an external, unprotected network when they definitely should have been isolated. That's a preventable virus and unrelated to conversations about backdoors being built into technology for governments to access.
Yup. If you can’t hack over the network, you can hack them into psychologically creating a vulnerability
People are pretty much always the weakest link when it comes to security.
Weren't Iran's centrifuges only hacked because they used off-the-shelf parts made in the U.S.?
We dropped a USB stick in the parking lot and they plugged the virus into the system lol
I don't know that part would have made much difference, they were already air gapped and the NSA probably could have figured out just about any centrifuge: The hard part was delivering the payload, which was apparently delivered via a rubber ducky left in a parking lot.
Goddamn that’s scary
Can't we even avoid that by using lineage or graphene? We're really fucked unless we are like cybersec experts...
Wonder if Google, Apple, or SoC makera are asked or secretly mandated to leave certain backdoors in. I know mobile providers have quite a bit they can see on their end.
It's a good thing we're always presented with two choices for everything, like mobile OS's, to control our choices like we're toddlers.
They don't really need to, the company making Pegasus is very very skilled, they however get paid for that as well, its absolutely not worth it for a normal person usually.
Mobile operators have baseband which is why we have modem isolation. And some of us can see quite a bit on our end, too.
How do you get Pegasus onto LineageOS or GrapheneOS? Especially on hardware with modem isolation?
Linux and similar Systems are harder to hack but not impossible, i cant tell more, cause i don't know more.
From the Guardian article somebody else linked:
This isn't even wrong. What is the attack vector? They send a magic message that 0wns Signal, and then cleans up? At scale? With nobody noticing? This doesn't happen.
A few comments, they don’t need to have a Signal vulnerability, just an OS vulnerability since that would allow access to decrypted Signal messages. In the past, there have been zero click SMS and iMessage vulnerabilities. There have also been web vulnerabilities.
The attacks are not sent at scale to avoid detection. They are used on specific dissidents and journalists.
You need to exploit an OS vulnerability or use suitable baseband processor as a backdoor, facilitated by the cellular operator. To exploit the OS or an a service on it you need a network connection. You can't inject through an ad if there is no browser or email if there is no client.
Yes, you can spearphish but this can't mass-target French mobile users as the article seems to claim. France isn't North Korea, not just yet.
TIme to find out what the vulnerabilieties are and EXPOSE them in a OPEN repository.
On lineageos also just pegasus. Only thing that makes it better than stock android is that you have more chances for security patches. Dumno about graphene, it has some additional protections, but still susceptible to some vulnerabilities of android.
Same way you do with everything else: Exploits.
Everyone causally saying the government can just do it with Pegasus is ignoring the fact that Pegasus itself is an exploit. It is a hack, to breach your personal device. If I used the same methods to get into a bank’s systems it would be a violation of the law. Same if I created this software and gave it to you for the same purpose. Ask yourselves why it would be permissible to sell this software then commercially? And, why is it permissible for the government to use it to hack your own devices. Let’s not just brush over this discussion like it’s nothing.
Nobody ignores the fact that government is doing something illegal when the conversation about their rampant spying happens. You may just be late to the party. We all know it's illegal, unethical, and immoral. It basically comes down to this:
What are you going to do about it?
We're living in objectively dystopian times. Our government does illegal shit literally all the time and gets away with it.
The very least people can do is talk about it and acknowledge it's bad.
Acceptance and normalization support the other side.
My generation has talked it to death. It's pretty agreed upon that we're being fucked and have very little power to stop it. Eventually you don't have time to rehash all the heinous shit that happens because you realize there's a constant deluge of it. Has nothing to do with "supporting the other side" lol. If reality has got you feeling insane, well, you're on the right track.
We have everything we need to stop it, we’re just spun and poorly organized (by design).
Bingo.
Tangential quote: We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. -JFK
The fact that things are the way they are by design makes it harder for us to overcome them, but it should also make it abundantly clear it’s on us to do so.
I empathize with the feeling of powerlessness. And I encourage reaching past that from time to time to see where action is already taking place that only requires the slightest nudge from you to boost. Many hands make light work when those hands are pushing/pulling in the same direction.
While this news article is, apparently, not trustworthy, in general, France could demand every phone sold in the country include some kind of spyware. Many sellers already add a lot of programs by default anyway, so this would be how I image it might be implemented.
Given that 7 people were recently arrested for using privacy respecting tools like the Signal messenger and Protonmail, removing that bloatware/spyware might then be cause enough to arrest you. After all, only terrorists want to have privacy, right?
Oh my sweet summer child