Yevgeniy Polyanin
When does a bird sing?
:52 clock (today)
Ukrainian Arrested and Charged with Ransomware Attack on Kaseya
Justice Department Seizes $6.1 million Related to Alleged Ransomware Extortionists
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/ukrainian-arrested-and-charged-ransomware-attack-kaseya
∞
Despite Abuses of NSO Spyware, Israel Will Lobby U.S. to Defend It
As a new accusation surfaces that NSO’s software may have been used to spy on Palestinians, Israeli officials say it is crucial to national security.
Nov. 8, 2021
Updated 4:55 p.m. ET
JERUSALEM — Hacking software sold by the NSO Group, an Israeli surveillance firm, has been used to spy on journalists, opposition groups and rights activists. There have been so many accusations of abuse that the Biden administration slapped sanctions on the company last week.
But the company’s biggest backer, the government of Israel, considers the software a crucial element of its foreign policy and is lobbying Washington to remove the company from the blacklist, two senior Israeli officials said Monday.
NSO insists that the software — which allows governments to remotely and secretly penetrate a phone, monitor its location and extract it contents — is intended to help countries combat organized crime and terrorism.
But there has been a drumbeat of periodic revelations of abuse, with the company’s Pegasus software used to hack the phones of political opponents in dozens of countries.
The latest accusation came Monday, when international computer privacy experts said that Pegasus had been deployed against Palestinian rights activists, raising questions about whether the Israeli government itself was behind the hacking.
If the new claims are true, the case would be yet another instance of the software being used against rights advocates and the first known instance of it being used inside Israel and the occupied territories.
The Israeli prime minister’s office and the Defense Ministry denied that Pegasus had been used to hack the Palestinians’ phones. An NSO spokeswoman said that the company would not say who used the software and that it did not have access to information about whom the program was used against.
But the fact that such reports have led to a breach in relations with the United States alarmed the Israeli government, the senior officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss issues of national security and diplomatic relations.
In imposing the sanctions, the U.S. Commerce Department said that NSO had acted “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.” If the United States is accusing NSO of acting against its interests, the officials said, then it is implicitly accusing Israel, which licenses the software, of doing the same.
Israel insists that it maintains strict control over the licensing, with a review process by the Defense Ministry that was established in part to assure that no commercial deals would jeopardize Israel’s relationship with the United States.
The campaign to remove the sanctions against NSO and a second company, Candiru, will seek to persuade the Biden administration that their activities remain of great importance to the national security of both countries, the officials said.
They also said that Israel would be willing to commit to much tighter supervision on licensing the software.
Aside from Israel’s Defense Ministry review process, the global market for spyware is largely unregulated. Those targeted by the Pegasus spyware in the past include people close to Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and columnist murdered by Saudi agents in 2018; investigative journalists in Hungary; and lawyers in Mexico.
The investigation finding that the software was used against Palestinian rights activists, first reported by The Associated Press, did not definitively identify which government used Pegasus in this case.
“But it raises a lot of questions as to the role not only of NSO, but also of Israel,” said Adam Shapiro, a spokesman for Front Line Defenders, a Dublin-based rights group that conducted the investigation along with Amnesty International and Citizen Lab, a cyber-watchdog affiliated with the University of Toronto.
“There are only so many options that could be plausible here,” Mr. Shapiro said, “and the previous actions of the Israeli government raise real questions about what’s going on here and serious doubts about any denials that the government makes.”
The latest accusations mark the convergence of what had previously been two separate diplomatic issues for Israel: its outlawing last month of six Palestinian rights groups it accused of being fronts for a banned militant group, which attracted widespread international criticism, and its longstanding support for NSO, which operates under state-issued licenses.
The analysis said that four of the six Palestinians whose phones were hacked were employees of the outlawed groups.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/08/world/middleeast/nso-israel-palestinians-spyware.html
only ONE drop
Do UNICORNS exist?
:46
11.3 = :46
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