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Security United States

Spyware Hacks of Federal Workers Could Run Into Hundreds, Lawmaker Says (bloomberg.com) 10

Posted by msmash from the security-woes dept.
A US government probe into how many mobile phones belonging to diplomats and government workers have been infected with spyware could "easily run to the hundreds," according to a member of the House Intelligence Committee. From a report: Jim Himes, a Democrat representative from Connecticut, told Bloomberg News that the Biden administration is "just beginning to get an inkling of the magnitude of the problem." He predicted that the probe could find that spyware was used against "hundreds" of federal personnel in "multiple countries." Himes was a lead author of a September letter calling on the federal government to better protect US diplomats overseas from spyware and publicly detail instances of such abuse. He received a letter last month written jointly by the Departments of Commerce and State that confirmed commercial spyware has targeted US government personnel serving overseas.

"Spyware technology has sort of moved beyond our ability to ensure that the communications of our diplomats are protected, or even the locations and contacts and photographs of our diplomats are protected. And that's obviously a huge vulnerability," he said. The official confirmation follows a Reuters report from last year that the iPhones of at least nine State Department employees were hacked with spyware developed by Israel's NSO Group. The employees were either based in Uganda or focused on issues related to the country, according to the report.
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Spyware Hacks of Federal Workers Could Run Into Hundreds, Lawmaker Says More

Spyware Hacks of Federal Workers Could Run Into Hundreds, Lawmaker Says

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  • Especially if you have a broad definition of spyware - but even if you restrict it to "malware that leaks data to a hostile nation-state" it has to be in the tens of thousands of affected devices, at least. It may be that only a few hundred SPECIFIC TARGETED USERS had their devices compromised, but at a certainty there are tens of thousands of devices providing intel to "the bad guys", however you define that term - criminals, nation states, whatever.

    • ... how many mobile phones belonging to diplomats and government workers have been infected with spyware could "easily run to the hundreds"

      Reading that immediately brought up the image of a bunch of Chinese suits keeling over with laughter. It's more likely that each adversarial unit in their megalithic monitoring state would have hundreds of assets just to themselves.

  • Spyware technology has sort of moved beyond our ability to ensure that the communications of our diplomats are protected

    It is because of the zero-day-hungry government organizations (which on paper should guarantee cybersecurity) that the trade in vulnerabilities is rampant and the defense against it is hardly existing.

  • Anyone else notice that Slashdot's A record isn't resolving at Google's DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4)?

    It resolves at cloudflare (and elsewhere):
    $ dig +short @1.1.1.1 slashdot.org A
    104.18.29.86
    104.18.28.86

    But not Google:
    $ dig +short @8.8.8.8 slashdot.org A
    ?

    The slashdot.org subdomains are resolving (news, technology, etc.) Just not the TLD.

  • Today:
    "Spyware technology has sort of moved beyond our ability to ensure that the communications of our diplomats are protected"

    Four years ago [slashdot.org]:

    "Wray described the issue of "Going Dark" because of encryption as a "significant" and "growing" problem for federal, state and local law enforcement as well as foreign law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He claims strong encryption on mobile phones keeps law enforcement from gaining access to key evidence as it relates to active criminal investigations. "Peop

  • Wait. This is only occurring to them now? My first action when hearing of Pegasus would be to stop using a 64-bit mobile OS that I didn't control.

  • remove those positions and really replace them with "of, by, and for the people" https://3seas.org/ [3seas.org]

    They can spy on all of us, but what good would that do, unless they have lots of aspirin.

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