{"id":8326,"date":"2015-05-21T06:41:00","date_gmt":"2015-05-21T11:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8326"},"modified":"2015-05-21T06:41:00","modified_gmt":"2015-05-21T11:41:00","slug":"nsa-planned-to-hijack-google-app-store-to-hack-smartphones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=8326","title":{"rendered":"NSA Planned to Hijack Google App Store to Hack Smartphones"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3 class=\"title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/firstlook.org\/theintercept\/2015\/05\/21\/nsa-five-eyes-google-samsung-app-stores-spyware\/\" target=\"_blank\">NSA Planned to Hijack Google App Store to Hack Smartphones<\/a><\/h3>\n<p class=\"western\" lang=\"en-GB\">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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"western\" lang=\"en-GB\">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 \u201cFive Eyes\u201d alliance \u2014 the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia.<\/p>\n<p class=\"western\" lang=\"en-GB\">The top-secret document, obtained from NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, was\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.cbc.ca\/news\/canada\/spy-agencies-target-mobile-phones-app-stores-to-implant-spyware-1.3076546\">published Wednesday by CBC News<\/a>\u00a0in collaboration with<i>The Intercept<\/i>. The\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.documentcloud.org\/documents\/2083944-uc-web-report-final-for-dc.html\">document<\/a>\u00a0outlines 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.<\/p>\n<p class=\"western\" lang=\"en-GB\">The main purpose of the workshops was to find new ways to exploit smartphone technology for surveillance. The agencies used the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2013\/jul\/31\/nsa-top-secret-program-online-data\">Internet spying system XKEYSCORE<\/a>\u00a0to 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 \u201cat this time.\u201d)<\/p>\n<p class=\"western\" lang=\"en-GB\">As part of a pilot project codenamed IRRITANT HORN, the agencies were developing a method to hack and hijack phone users\u2019 connections to app stores so that they would be able to send malicious \u201cimplants\u201d to targeted devices. The implants could then be used to collect data from the phones without their users noticing.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><span class=\"Apple-style-span\">Previous\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/world\/2014\/jan\/27\/nsa-gchq-smartphone-app-angry-birds-personal-data\">disclosures<\/a>\u00a0from 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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>&#8230;click on the above link to read the rest of the article&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2711,378,5551,551,577,5552,5550,747,765],"class_list":["post-8326","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-five-eyes","tag-google","tag-google-app-store","tag-national-security-agency","tag-nsa","tag-samsung","tag-smartphones","tag-spyware","tag-surveillance"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8326","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8326"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8326\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8327,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8326\/revisions\/8327"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8326"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8326"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8326"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}