Key GOP Lawmaker Calls for Renewal of Surveillance Tool as He Proposes Changes to Protect Privacy

The Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee has called for the renewal of a key US government surveillance tool as he proposed a series of changes aimed at safeguarding privacy.
The post Key GOP Lawmaker Calls for Renewal of Surveillanc… Continue reading Key GOP Lawmaker Calls for Renewal of Surveillance Tool as He Proposes Changes to Protect Privacy

Chinese APT Posing as Cloud Services to Spy on Cambodian Government

By Deeba Ahmed
Palo Alto’s Unit 42 Reveals Chinese APT Spying on 24 Cambodian Government Entities as Part of Long-Term Cyberespionage.
This is a post from HackRead.com Read the original post: Chinese APT Posing as Cloud Services to Spy on Cambodian Gov… Continue reading Chinese APT Posing as Cloud Services to Spy on Cambodian Government

Spyware in India

Apple has warned leaders of the opposition government in India that their phones are being spied on:

Multiple top leaders of India’s opposition parties and several journalists have received a notification from Apple, saying that “Apple believes you are being targeted by state-sponsored attackers who are trying to remotely compromise the iPhone associated with your Apple ID ….”

AccessNow puts this in context:

For India to uphold fundamental rights, authorities must initiate an immediate independent inquiry, implement a ban on the use of rights-abusing commercial spyware, and make a commitment to reform the country’s surveillance laws. These latest warnings build on repeated instances of cyber intrusion and spyware usage, and highlights the surveillance impunity in India that continues to flourish despite the public outcry triggered by the …

Continue reading Spyware in India

Messaging Service Wiretap Discovered through Expired TLS Cert

Fascinating story of a covert wiretap that was discovered because of an expired TLS certificate:

The suspected man-in-the-middle attack was identified when the administrator of jabber.ru, the largest Russian XMPP service, received a notification that one of the servers’ certificates had expired.

However, jabber.ru found no expired certificates on the server, ­ as explained in a blog post by ValdikSS, a pseudonymous anti-censorship researcher based in Russia who collaborated on the investigation.

The expired certificate was instead discovered on a single port being used by the service to establish an encrypted Transport Layer Security (TLS) connection with users. Before it had expired, it would have allowed someone to decrypt the traffic being exchanged over the service…

Continue reading Messaging Service Wiretap Discovered through Expired TLS Cert

New NSA Information from (and About) Snowden

Interesting article about the Snowden documents, including comments from former Guardian editor Ewen MacAskill

MacAskill, who shared the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service with Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras for their journalistic work on the Snowden files, retired from The Guardian in 2018. He told Computer Weekly that:

  • As far as he knows, a copy of the documents is still locked in the New York Times office. Although the files are in the New York Times office, The Guardian retains responsibility for them.
  • As to why the New York Times has not published them in a decade, MacAskill maintains “this is a complicated issue.” “There is, at the very least, a case to be made for keeping them for future generations of historians,” he said…

Continue reading New NSA Information from (and About) Snowden

Child Exploitation and the Crypto Wars

Susan Landau published an excellent essay on the current justification for the government breaking end-to-end-encryption: child sexual abuse and exploitation (CSAE). She puts the debate into historical context, discusses the problem of CSAE, and explai… Continue reading Child Exploitation and the Crypto Wars