I’ve blogged twice about the Bloomberg story that China bugged Supermicro networking equipment destined to the US. We still don’t know if the story is true, although I am increasingly skeptical because of the lack of corroborating evidence to emerge. We don’t know anything more, but this is the most comprehensive rebuttal of the story … Read More “More on the Supermicro Spying Story” »
Category: espionage
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The former CIA Chief of Disguise has a fascinating video about her work. Powered by WPeMatico
Citizen Lab has published a new report about the Pegasus spyware. From a ZDNet article: The malware, known as Pegasus (or Trident), was created by Israeli cyber-security firm NSO Group and has been around for at least three years — when it was first detailed in a report over the summer of 2016. The malware … Read More “Pegasus Spyware Used in 45 Countries” »
The Intercept has a long story about the NSA’s domestic interception points. Includes some new Snowden documents. Powered by WPeMatico
The Intercept has a long article on Japan’s equivalent of the NSA: the Directorate for Signals Intelligence. Interesting, but nothing really surprising. The directorate has a history that dates back to the 1950s; its role is to eavesdrop on communications. But its operations remain so highly classified that the Japanese government has disclosed little about … Read More “Japan’s Directorate for Signals Intelligence” »
The EFF and Lookout are reporting on a new piece of spyware operating out of Lebanon. It primarily targets mobile devices compromised by fake secure messaging clients like Signal and WhatsApp. From the Lookout announcement: Dark Caracal has operated a series of multi-platform campaigns starting from at least January 2012, according to our research. The … Read More “Dark Caracal: Global Espionage Malware from Lebanon” »
Politico reports that White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s cell phone was compromised back in December. I know this is news because of who he is, but I hope every major government official of any country assumes that their commercial off-the-shelf cell phone is compromised. Even allies spy on allies; remember the reports that … Read More “White House Chief of Staff John Kelly’s Cell Phone was Tapped” »
Kaspersky Labs exposed a highly sophisticated set of hacking tools from Russia called WhiteBear. From February to September 2016, WhiteBear activity was narrowly focused on embassies and consular operations around the world. All of these early WhiteBear targets were related to embassies and diplomatic/foreign affair organizations. Continued WhiteBear activity later shifted to include defense-related organizations … Read More “Russian Hacking Tools Codenamed WhiteBear Exposed” »
Back in 2013, Der Spiegel reported that the NSA intercepts and collects Windows bug reports: One example of the sheer creativity with which the TAO spies approach their work can be seen in a hacking method they use that exploits the error-proneness of Microsoft’s Windows. Every user of the operating system is familiar with the … Read More “NSA Collects MS Windows Error Information” »
Last year, I wrote about the potential for doxers to alter documents before they leaked them. It was a theoretical threat when I wrote it, but now Citizen Lab has documented this technique in the wild: This report describes an extensive Russia-linked phishing and disinformation campaign. It provides evidence of how documents stolen from a … Read More “Tainted Leaks” »
