Category Archives: Egypt

ISPs inside Turkey and Egypt spread FinFisher spyware in massive espionage campaign

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An expansive and ongoing computer espionage campaign spread across Egypt, Turkey and Syria has been powered by technology developed by a Canadian-American networking company, SandVine, and an infamous spyware maker known as GammaGroup or Lench IT Solutions, security researchers say. New research by human rights advocacy organization Citizen Lab shows how products made by two Western technology contractors facilitated nationwide surveillance in multiple developing countries under authoritarian rule. The findings piggyback on prior reporting by a Slovakian cybersecurity company, which also discovered similar “man-in-the-middle” cyberattacks at the internet service provider (ISP) level in September and December. People getting online through local ISPs in Egypt, Turkey and Syria were tricked into installing highly intrusive spyware that allows the attacker to gain full access of an infected device, including its microphone and camera. Whenever targeted users in Turkey attempted to access certain websites to install free software, they were instead covertly served up a nearly identical but boobytrapped […]

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Al Jazeera comes under cyberattack as Persian Gulf crisis escalates

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Al Jazeera Media Network, the state-funded broadcaster partly owned by Qatar’s ruling family, is “undergoing systematic and continual hacking attempts,” the company announced on Thursday. “These attempts are gaining intensity and taking various forms.” There has been no compromise of any Al Jazeera systems, according to a statement on the news organization’s website. The cyberattacks against Al Jazeera closely follow a rash of political hacks across Persian Gulf states that triggered a diplomatic crisis over alleged Qatari connections to radical and terrorist networks. CyberScoop has reached out to Al Jazeera and will update this story when we receive a response. In the last two weeks, a Qatari media outlet was hacked apparently to plant fake quotes from Emir Sheikh Tamim, emails were leaked from the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United States and the Twitter account of Bahrain’s Foreign Minister was hacked to post pro-militant propaganda. The connection between all the events remains […]

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How Signal Is Evading Censorship

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Signal, the encrypted messaging app I prefer, is being blocked in both Egypt and the UAE. Recently, the Signal team developed a workaround: domain fronting. Signal’s new anti-censorship feature uses a trick called "domain fronting," Marlinspike explains. A country like Egypt, with only a few small internet service providers tightly controlled by the government, can block any direct request to… Continue reading How Signal Is Evading Censorship→

Code Like an Egyptian

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[Marcelo Maximiano’s] son had a school project. He and a team of students built “The Pyramid’s Secret“–an electronic board game using the Arduino Nano. [Marcelo] helped with the electronics, but the result is impressive and a great example of packaging an Arduino project. You can see a video of the game, below.

In addition to the processor, the game uses a WT5001M02 MP3 player (along with an audio amplifier) to produce music and voices. There’s also a rotary encoder, an LCD, a EEPROM (to hold the quiz questions and answers), and an LED driver. There’s also a bunch of LEDs, …read more

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