Alphabethas just published a report written byThreat Analysis Group, an independent team withinGoogle, in charge of “counter government-backed hacking and attacks.»
Espionage, a booming market
The report, titledBuying Spying — Insights into Commercial Surveillance Vendors, carefully explores the surveillance industry, where advanced spying technologies are commercialized. These latter allowmany governmentsacross the worldsecretly spy on various profiles of people. The report highlights the key players, their operations, as well as the products they are developing, and then analyzes their recent activities.
The group introduces its report with some generalities on this type of malicious attack, recalling how harmful they can be for our democratic societies.
Although the use of spyware typically affects only a small number of human targets at a time, its broader impact ripples throughout society by contributing to growing threats to free speech, freedom of the press and the integrity of elections around the world.
The surveillance industry is made up of various players. There are of course those who provide the services, and those who buy them. Without going into detail, the companies that provide spying servicesfind flaws in thetools we use every day, such as iOS, and then secretly install spyware on them.They can then send private information to the requesters, who most often turn out to be governments.
iPhones targeted in Indonesia
In its report, Google said it discovered that a client of a spy company namedVariston, took advantage of the “zero days» of a flaw to target iPhones in Indonesia. THE "zero days» are the number of days where a flaw is exploited without the victim party in charge of the security of the attacked program being aware, here it is Apple. Additionally, despite discovering the spy client's identity, Google did not publicly disclose it in its report.
TechCrunchfor its part analyzed the report of the investigation and tried to contact various suppliers of these spying services in order to obtain their testimonies, but as usual in this type of business,they turn a deaf ear. Unfortunately, these types of companies operate with impunity thanks to certain laws that protect them, as do the governments that use their services.
According to Google, under the guise of fighting crime,many governments abuse espionage and make more than dubious use of it,endangering the balance of certain existing societies. This is reminiscent of the report published byReutersat the beginning of December 2023, concerningspying on iPhones by democratic governments allied with the USA.
Google here affirms its opposition to this type of espionage campaign operated by governments, and promises to disrupt them.
See also
i-nfo.fr - Official iPhon.fr app
By : Keleops AG
