It's always Israel, Russia, North Korea, or China. Why do we let them have access to our communications infrastructure?
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Israeli Security Firm Claims Spyware Tool Can Harvest iCloud Data in Targeted iPhone Attack
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Every year at DEF CON, iOS and other OSes are cracked by hackers via multiple vulnerabilities. Those vulnerabilities are disclosed and hopefully patched by the vendor. All vulnerabilities aren't disclosed. I seriously doubt any government agency is at DEF CON disclosing their tools for a $50K bounty. It's software sold to governments for targeted attacks. Customs and Border Patrol would be an easy vector for a government to physically access a target's devices. You're trying to frame this in the context of us, consumers. This issue really isn't about us... yet.
Lol. You think the USA and Uk equivalents just sit and twiddle thumbs all day?
they’re also doing it
What a bold statement, do you have knowledge of each and every country in the world, did you live in other countries for an extended period of time, if so you must be the almighty allknowing god.
Please enlighten us...
Guess what, not all governments suck.
As for the article, I have my doubts, serious doubts.
They may not all suck today, but as time progresses the chances that will continue fall dramatically. In short, they all will eventually suck at some point.
Today you may have person X, but tomorrow you may have Bernie/Trump/Hillary/Warren/Merkel/May/Macron/Chavez etc, pick whichever ones you despise and think about them having access to all your data.
The Pegasus spyware was able to be performed remotely by having victims click on links (e.g., send via text, messaging apps, emails, etc.) that would then proceed to install the spyware in the background.
I wouldn’t go ahead and say that this can only be installed by someone with physical access to your phone.
I wouldn’t go ahead and say that this can only be installed by someone with physical access to your phone.
Boring news. Just assume every single communication and piece of data has or can be seen by anyone who wants it - because it can be. Snowden told us this years ago.
Or, how about use by Western Democracies to track and place whistleblowers in jail? Whatever you may think of the specifics in, for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Tice, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_(intelligence_official), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Manning
One has to be completely blind and naive to believe that governments always act in the best interests of it's citizens - even in the USA / Europe.
Agreed, though the genius of iCloud backups for iOS is that there's almost zero friction to backing up this way (selecting "yes" at some point during the setup process, and plugging the device in overnight at least occasionally).
Backing up Macs, though, would be a very different animal - most of the space on iOS devices is taken up by things that can be reloaded from other sources: Apple doesn't need to keep unique copies of all your apps - they can just pull fresh copies from their App Store - they only need to back up the data you've created with those apps, similarly, if you download movies or music from iTunes, or photos that are already stored in iCloud, they don't need to keep unique copies of those in your backup data either. For many iOS devices, the backups are going to be a few gigabytes. On the other hand, Macs can get apps and data from all over the place, and the backups for a given Mac could easily run to hundreds of gigabytes. And there's more potential for large changes to that content, leading to much more daily traffic. I'm not sure Apple wants to take on that load.
The problem is that being part of modern civilisation means that one is compelled to use these communications forms. It is not an option for me to be part of society and not be connected. Even if I avoid Facebook and Whatsapp as much as possible - forgoing email, forums etc would lead to extreme social isolation
I would not be surprised if they have been served with National Security Orders or political threats to prevent future development of security features like these.
After all, today Apple is basically a marketing company that produces so-so technology, so why should they get their underwear in a wad if their users can be monitored. They only thing that will get them going is bad press like this because they are certainly not going to spend major bucks protecting their users unless not protecting them is seen as damaging their brand.
My experience, even professional tech people fail to back up their stuff more often than they care to admit.
Y'all have heard the stories about some CGI movies were almost lost because someone wiped the network drives, only to be salvaged because an animator had a copy they were working on at home.Is it just me, or does anyone find in annoying a hacker group calls itself a security company? Call a spade a spade. None of that, your terrorist is my freedom fighter rubbish.
iCloud Backup for iOS works beautifully, but the friction comes into play when people use up their free 5 GB. I've witnessed so many people dismiss the popup to add more storage space - who become the same people who complain when their phone takes a swim and their last backup was six months ago.
Thanks to a few patriots and freedom fighters like Snowden and Assange we now know that the USA is one of the biggest threats to mankind. The USA can justify just about any action without any reason whatsoever internally or in any other country.
Our current government (including both republican and democrat political sides) makes me sick and does not represent what America's people should stand for. It also is the reason why we must de-power the US government at every level through peaceful protests and voting. At this point in time there is no reason important enough to give the US government more power. Period.
This. Can we stop calling these companies "Security Firms" and call them what they actually are, Black Hat Hackers. A Security Firm would provide Apple with details on the exploits, so they could be corrected. These guys are instead leaving users vulnerable, and selling them out to governments (and who knows who else).
Calling this cretinous outfit a “security firm” is laughable on its face. They should be shamed on social media until the cows come home.
I think I give BackBlaze $10.00 a month for this service. They back up my Mac plus any drives attached and I don't think there is a storage limit. I can't see Apple offering anything close to that. Can you imagine a 2 TB hard drive and then like 4 TB's of external discs?
I have seriously considered purchasing a burner phone that isn't tied to anything for international travel then turning on call forwarding and leaving my iPhone at home. It may sound extreme but I really don't like the idea of having some nimrod demand I unlock my phone or having them take my phone / tablet out of my line of sight for a few minutes.
Did you stop reading at that point?
Nevermind everyone else seemed to have read up to
“ is only sold to responsible governments to help prevent terrorist attacks and criminal investigations.”
No one pay any attention the the following:
“However, the WhatsApp flaw was used to target a London lawyer who has been involved in lawsuits against the NSO Group, and security researchers believe others could have been targeted as well.”
Yanks go blue in the face about a Russians, not a peep out of them about Israelis who are the most malicious group with a long history of these type of exploits...remember them infecting and hostile taking over Iranian nuclear power station control systems?
Bah freak show planet....
Just to keep it straight, they disabled a centrifuge network that was refining uranium. Not a power station.
There are 2 types of computer users. Those who have lost data and those who will lose data.
