Ahmed Mansoor is an internationally recognized human rights defender, based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and recipient of the Martin Ennals Award (sometimes referred to as a “Nobel Prize for human rightsâ€). On August 10 and 11, 2016, Mansoor received SMS text messages on his iPhone promising “new secrets†about detainees tortured in UAE jails if he clicked on an included link. Instead of clicking, Mansoor sent the messages to Citizen Lab researchers. We recognized the links as belonging to an exploit infrastructure connected to NSO Group, an Israel-based “cyber war†company that sells Pegasus, a government-exclusive “lawful intercept†spyware product. NSO Group is reportedly owned by an American venture capital firm, Francisco Partners Management.
The ensuing investigation, a collaboration between researchers from Citizen Lab and from Lookout Security, determined that the links led to a chain of zero-day exploits (“zero-daysâ€) that would have remotely jailbroken Mansoor’s stock iPhone 6 and installed sophisticated spyware. We are calling this exploit chain Trident. Once infected, Mansoor’s phone would have become a digital spy in his pocket, capable of employing his iPhone’s camera and microphone to snoop on activity in the vicinity of the device, recording his WhatsApp and Viber calls, logging messages sent in mobile chat apps, and tracking his movements.
I’ve never heard of this guy before, but he’s obviously got some brains.
Is ruining everybody experience with IT, but specially at Windows Land. Not a good mood, globally.
thats how ww3 would begin
A virtual battlefront is unlike a real one. No one is going to defend a bridge ’till the last man. Lack of advance at the issue is giving financial groundings to new, W3C detached Research.
That’s both extremely targeted and good on him for doing the right thing security-wise.
Were an exploit like this to come out that affects Android devices, how quickly could Google push out a fix for it? How many devices could access the fix? How many devices would NEVER have access to the fix?
Apple did the right thing in pushing out a rapid fix for this exploit, and I think it illustrates the utter futility for Google to push out OS updates, new OS versions, and security fixes. The fact that a fix went out immediately to ALL affected and updatable devices is exemplary.
There has already been a documented security problem that probably affects 900 million Android devices, but Google is unable to get a fix out to all of them because of the restrictions device manufacturers and carriers have that delay those things for months and years. These are all reasons why I just can’t have an Android device, no matter how cool they are. I value security.
Edited 2016-08-28 13:17 UTC