Home » Posts tagged 'spyware'
Tag Archives: spyware
Inside the Spyware Campaign Against Argentine Troublemakers
Inside the Spyware Campaign Against Argentine Troublemakers
Alberto Nisman, the Argentine prosecutor known for doggedly investigating a 1994 Buenos Aires bombing, was targeted by invasive spy software downloaded onto his cellular phone shortly before his mysterious death. The software masqueraded as a confidential document and was intended to infect a Windows computer.
An investigation by The Intercept indicates that this targeting was likely not an isolated event. The person or persons behind the attempted monitoring appear to have run other surveillance operations involving various locations throughout South America, at least one apparently targeting a rabble-rousing Argentine journalist. In the process, they created at least four distinct spyware bundles, all communicating with the same server set to receive Nisman’s data. They also left traces showing that their operations were active as recently as March, raising the possibility that the online spying continues today.
Nisman (pictured above) made powerful enemies inside and outside of Argentina. In his decade-long investigation into the suicide bombing of a Jewish organization and community center, Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, he indicted a top Hezbollah operative and several Iranian officials, including a former president, former intelligence minister, and a former foreign minister. Four days before his death, he accused the president of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, and her foreign minister, Héctor Timerman, of being involved in a criminal conspiracy to let Iranian officials off the hook for the attack. He was called to testify before Congress.
But the night before he was slated to deliver that testimony, Nisman was found in his apartment dead from a bullet wound to the head. An autopsy ruled his death a suicide. But as details of the police investigation emerged, so did more and more questions into the manner of his demise. There was no suicide note, nor was any gunpowder residue found on Nisman’s hands. A document requesting the arrest of Kirchner and Timerman was found in Nisman’s trash. And it seemed much of the evidence had been gathered in a disorganized and erratic manner.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Hacking Team and Boeing Subsidiuary Envisioned Drones Deploying Spyware
Hacking Team and Boeing Subsidiuary Envisioned Drones Deploying Spyware
There are lots of ways that government spies can attack your computer, but a U.S. drone company is scheming to offer them one more. Boeing subsidiary Insitu would like to be able to deliver spyware via drone.
The plan is described in internal emails from the Italian company Hacking Team, which makes off-the-shelf software that can remotely infect a suspect’s computer or smartphone, accessing files and recording calls, chats, emails and more. A hacker attacked the Milan-based firm earlier this month and released hundreds of gigabytes of company information online.
Among the emails is a recap of a meeting in June of this year, which gives a “roadmap” of projects that Hacking Team’s engineers have underway.
On the list: Develop a way to infect computers via drone. One engineer is assigned the task of developing a “mini” infection device, which could be “ruggedized” and “transportable by drone (!)” the write-up notes enthusiastically in Italian.
The request appears to have originated with a query from the Washington-based Insitu, which makes a range of unmanned systems, including the small ScanEagle surveillance drone, which has long been used by the militaries of the U.S. and other countries. Insitu also markets its drones for law enforcement.
An Insitu engineer wrote to Hacking Team this April: “We see potential in integrating your Wi-Fi hacking capability into an airborne system and would be interested in starting a conversation with one of your engineers to go over, in more depth, the payload capabilities including the detailed size, weight, and power specs of your Galileo System.” (Galileo is the name of the most recent version of Hacking Team’s spyware, known as Remote Control System.)
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Leaked Documents Show FBI, DEA and U.S. Army Buying Italian Spyware
The FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. Army have all bought controversial software that allows users to take remote control of suspects’ computers, recording their calls, emails, keystrokes and even activating their cameras, according to internal documents hacked from the software’s Italian manufacturer.
The company, Hacking Team, has also been aggressively marketing the software to other U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, demonstrating their products to district attorneys in New York, San Bernardino, California, and Maricopa, Arizona; and multi-agency task forces like the Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation in Florida and California’s Regional Enforcement Allied Computer Team. (We do not use this product nor are we currently considering a proposal from the vendor/manufacturer to purchase it,” Jerry Cobb, a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office said.)
The company was also in conversation with various other agencies, including the CIA, the Pentagon’s Criminal Investigative Service, the New York Police Department, and Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.
The revelations come from hundreds of gigabytes of company information, including emails and financial records, which were released online Sunday night and analyzed by The Intercept. Milan-based Hacking Team is one of a handful of companies that sell off-the-shelf spyware for hundreds of thousands of euros — a price point accessible to smaller countries and large police forces. Hacking Team has drawn fire from human rights and privacy activists who contend that the company’s aggressive malware, known as Remote Control System, or RCS, is being sold to countries that deploy it against activists, political opponents and journalists.
Even in the U.S., where the software would presumably be used only with a judge’s approval, the tactic is still controversial. Just last month, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, wrote to the director of the FBI asking for “more specific information about the FBI’s current use of spyware,” in order for the Senate Judiciary Committee to evaluate “serious privacy concerns.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Spy agencies target mobile phones, app stores to implant spyware
Users of millions of smartphones put at risk by certain mobile browser gaps, Snowden file shows
Canada and its spying partners exploited weaknesses in one of the world’s most popular mobile browsers and planned to hack into smartphones via links to Google and Samsung app stores, a top secret document obtained by CBC News shows.
Electronic intelligence agencies began targeting UC Browser — a massively popular app in China and India with growing use in North America — in late 2011 after discovering it leaked revealing details about its half-billion users.
Their goal, in tapping into UC Browser and also looking for larger app store vulnerabilities, was to collect data on suspected terrorists and other intelligence targets — and, in some cases, implant spyware on targeted smartphones.
The 2012 document shows that the surveillance agencies exploited the weaknesses in certain mobile apps in pursuit of their national security interests, but it appears they didn’t alert the companies or the public to these weaknesses. That potentially put millions of users in danger of their data being accessed by other governments’ agencies, hackers or criminals.
“All of this is being done in the name of providing safety and yet … Canadians or people around the world are put at risk,” says the University of Ottawa’s Michael Geist, one of Canada’s foremost experts on internet law.
CBC News analysed the top secret document in collaboration with U.S. news site The Intercept, a website that is devoted in part to reporting on the classified documents leaked by U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The so-called Five Eyes intelligence alliance — the spy group comprising Canada, the U.S., Britain, Australia and New Zealand — specifically sought ways to find and hijack data links to servers used by Google and Samsung’s mobile app stores, according to the document obtained by Snowden.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
NSA Planned to Hijack Google App Store to Hack Smartphones
NSA Planned to Hijack Google App Store to Hack Smartphones
The National Security Agency and its closest allies planned to hijack data links to Google and Samsung app stores to infect smartphones with spyware, a top-secret document reveals.
The surveillance project was launched by a joint electronic eavesdropping unit called the Network Tradecraft Advancement Team, which includes spies from each of the countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance — the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia.
The top-secret document, obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, was published Wednesday by CBC News in collaboration withThe Intercept. The document outlines a series of tactics that the NSA and its counterparts in the Five Eyes were working on during workshops held in Australia and Canada between November 2011 and February 2012.
The main purpose of the workshops was to find new ways to exploit smartphone technology for surveillance. The agencies used the Internet spying system XKEYSCORE to identify smartphone traffic flowing across Internet cables and then to track down smartphone connections to app marketplace servers operated by Samsung and Google. (Google declined to comment for this story. Samsung said it would not be commenting “at this time.”)
As part of a pilot project codenamed IRRITANT HORN, the agencies were developing a method to hack and hijack phone users’ connections to app stores so that they would be able to send malicious “implants” to targeted devices. The implants could then be used to collect data from the phones without their users noticing.
Previous disclosures from the Snowden files have shown agencies in the Five Eyes alliance designed spyware for iPhones and Android smartphones, enabling them to infect targeted phones and grab emails, texts, web history, call records, videos, photos and other files stored on them. But methods used by the agencies to get the spyware onto phones in the first place have remained unclear.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Secret Manuals Show the Spyware Sold to Despots and Cops Worldwide – The Intercept
Secret Manuals Show the Spyware Sold to Despots and Cops Worldwide – The Intercept.
When Apple and Google unveiled new encryption schemes last month, law enforcement officials complained that they wouldn’t be able to unlock evidence on criminals’ digital devices. What they didn’t say is that there are already methods to bypass encryption, thanks to off-the-shelf digital implants readily available to the smallest national agencies and the largest city police forces — easy-to-use software that takes over and monitors digital devices in real time, according to documents obtained by The Intercept.
We’re publishing in full, for the first time, manuals explaining the prominent commercial implant software “Remote Control System,” manufactured by the Italian company Hacking Team. Despite FBI director James Comey’s dire warnings about the impact of widespread data scrambling — “criminals and terrorists would like nothing more,” he declared — Hacking Team explicitly promises on its website that its software can “defeat encryption.”
The manuals describe Hacking Team’s software for government technicians and analysts, showing how it can activate cameras, exfiltrate emails, record Skype calls, log typing, and collect passwords on targeted devices. They also catalog a range of pre-bottled techniques for infecting those devices using wifi networks, USB sticks, streaming video, and email attachments to deliver viral installers. With a few clicks of a mouse, even a lightly trained technician can build a software agent that can infect and monitor a device, then upload captured data at unobtrusive times using a stealthy network of proxy servers, all without leaving a trace. That, at least, is what Hacking Team’s manuals claim as the company tries to distinguish its offerings in the global marketplace for government hacking software.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
