![]() Its customer list was leaked to media outlets, and included the Sudanese and Saudi Arabian governments.Īs well as the trade in complete spyware products, another group of companies trade in information about zero-day vulnerabilities. One such company, Italy-based Hacking Team, was itself hacked in 2014. NSO Group is but one of a number of companies domiciled in wealthy American-allied democracies offering similar hacking tools to government agencies, including undemocratic governments known for systematic human rights violations. The news report goes on to say that Foreign Ministry officials stress the NSO Group was not involved in any data breach itself. Israeli newspaper YnetNews reports that the Defense Export Controls Agency (DECA) granted the NSO Group a license to sell its espionage program, Pegasus, to a private company in an Arab state, despite some strong objections. It says the same NSO Group software was also used to target journalists in Mexico, and had also been used in Kenya. The high cost of iPhone zero-days, the apparent use of NSO Group’s government-exclusive Pegasus product, and prior known targeting of Mansoor by the UAE government provide indicators that point to the UAE government as the likely operator behind the targeting. The Citizen Lab report on the Mansoor case says: NSO Group, spyware exporters extraordinaireĪccording to Citizen Lab researchers, the software used to target Mansoor’s iPhone was probably the work of NSO Group, an Israel-based company that is reportedly American-owned. It is the first known such attack against the iPhone. Its one weakness was that it required that Mansoor actually click on the malicious link in that message. It was sent to his phone as a text message. ![]() It used a combination of three zero-day vulnerabilities that were unknown to Apple and would have given the attackers complete control over his iPhone and the data on it. The attempted attack against Mansoor’s iPhone was extremely potent. Detailed reports are available from the researchers at Citizen Lab and Lookout Security. Mansoor was sufficiently sceptical to forward the message to security researchers, who investigated the message and discovered the exploit and its origins. The vulnerabilities in iOS came to light when an internationally recognised Emirati human rights activist, Ahmed Mansoor, received an odd-looking text message on his iPhone. The most insidious remote exploits happen without any user involvement, but even remote exploits that require tricking a user to click on a link, for instance, are often effective. A remote exploit is one that can be transmitted to the target device over a network. Similarly, exploits vary in the ways that they can be delivered. The most potent exploits are “root” exploits, which give an attacker complete control over the system. If an zero-day exploit is in the hands of an attacker, there is little a user or system administrator can do to stop them.Įxploits vary greatly in the scope of things they enable an attacker to do to a system. This means there is no fix available for the it.Īn exploit is a computer program that takes advantage of one or more vulnerabilities to make an IT system to do something its administrator didn’t intend it to do.Ī zero-day exploit is an exploit that uses an zero-day vulnerability. A zero-day vulnerability is simply one that is unknown to the developers of an IT system. In the world of information security, a vulnerability is a flaw in an IT system with security implications.
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