Google’s Play Store for Android apps has never had a reputation for the strictest protections from malware. Shady adware and even banking trojans have managed over the years to repeatedly defy Google’s security checks. Now security researchers have found what appears to be a more rare form of Android abuse: state-sponsored spies who repeatedly slipped their targeted hacking tools into the…
Tag: dissidents
Clearview AI Wants To Sell Its Facial Recognition To Authoritarian Regimes
popcornfan679 shares a report from Buzzfeed:
Clearview has been touting a “rapid international expansion” to prospective clients using a map that highlights how it either has expanded, or plans to expand, to at least 22 more countries, some of which have committed human rights abuses. The document, part of a presentation given to the North Miami Beach Police Department in November 2019,…
‘Police Tracked a Terror Suspect on WhatsApp — Until His Phone Went Dark After a Warning From Facebook’
“A team of European law-enforcement officials was hot on the trail of a potential terror plot in October, fearing an attack during Christmas season, when their keyhole into a suspect’s phone went dark,” reports the Wall Street Journal: WhatsApp, Facebook Inc.’s popular messaging tool, had just notified about 1,400 users — among them the suspected terrorist — that their phones had…
Defecting Chinese Spy Offers Information Trove To Australian Government
schwit1 shares a report from The Age, a daily newspaper published in Australia: A Chinese spy has risked his life to defect to Australia and is now offering a trove of unprecedented inside intelligence on how China conducts its interference operations abroad. Wang “William” Liqiang is the first Chinese operative to ever blow his cover. He has revealed the identities of…
New Simjacker Attack Exploited In the Wild To Track Users For At Least Two Years
Security researchers have disclosed today a major SMS-based attack method being abused in the real world by a surveillance vendor to track and monitor individuals. An anonymous reader shares a report: “We are quite confident that this exploit has been developed by a specific private company that works with governments to monitor individuals,” security researchers from AdaptiveMobile Security said in a…
Israeli Spyware Firm NSO Group is Wildly Profitable Despite Concerns Over Misuse of its Technology, Leaked Financials Show
An anonymous reader shares a report: The secretive Israeli spyware company NSO Group gained notoriety following allegations that its hacking tool Pegasus was used by governments like Saudi Arabia and Mexico to track dissidents and journalists. A few months later, the company was acquired for $1 billion by its cofounders Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie alongside the private equity firm Novalpina…
Guido van Rossum Looks at Python’s Past, Present, and Future
This week from 63-year-old Python creator Guido van Rossum shared some interesting stories with ZDNet’s senior reporter Nick Heath: While sharing software with the world today only takes a few clicks, in the 1980s it was an altogether more laborious affair, with van Rossum recalling the difficulties of trying to distribute Python precursor ABC. “I remember around ’85, going on a…
Lessons From 5 Years of Free Cybersecurity For At-Risk Groups
Cloudflare’s Project Galileo, which offers free high-tier DDoS protection service to journalists, dissidents, civil liberties groups and other at-risk groups, turned 5 years old this week. From a report: The project currently serves over 600 accounts. An LGBT protection group in the Middle East, for example, does important work on a shoestring budget and cannot possibly afford to block the outsized…
From Jesus Christ to Julian Assange: When Dissidents Become Enemies of the State
John W. Whitehead – That list of so-called “enemies of the state” is growing. Source: https://www.wakingtimes.com/2019/04/18/from-jesus-christ-to-julian-assange-when-dissidents-become-enemies-of-the-state/…