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April 4 - April 6, 2022
The Shellcoder’s Handbook: Discovering and Exploiting Security Holes. It
the 1990s, murders of Kurdish activists became common. The Turks had a legal term for these killings—“faili meçhul” which roughly translates as “unknown perpetrator”—and in the mid-1990s Kurdish Turks started disappearing by the thousands.
Using the tools he gleaned from hacking forums, he began hacking into university officials’ emails, and he could see that school officials were complicit in the crackdowns. “We couldn’t get access to everything, but we could collect the breadcrumbs—meeting minutes, appointments, schedules—and leak that to the press.”
Israel, Britain, Russia, India, Brazil, Malaysia, and Singapore started creating their own mandates and quotas for zero-day exploits and tools.
they were looking for tools to spy on their own people.
Everyone was told to talk up the defensive elements of their work to nosy reporters like me, and never, ever, to speak of the offensive work they were doing for their government clients.
Qatar’s freewheeling, influential news network, Al Jazeera, regularly blasted its Gulf neighbors. And the Qataris supported the Arab Spring in 2011, even as the UAE and Saudis grew especially terrified of, but narrowly avoided, uprisings of their own.“
the Emiratis just used reports that Qatar backed the Muslim Brotherhood to get NSA hackers to get them access to Qatar’s systems.”
In traffic one day, he witnessed a bad accident in which an Emirati ran through a stoplight and collided with an expat. Though the accident was clearly the Emirati’s fault, the local police let the Emirati get away and dragged the expat into custody.
‘Hey former NSA Operators, here’s what not to do when taking a job overseas,’ ” he began. “If the people sending you over there won’t tell you what you’re going to be doing before you get there, don’t go. If once you get over there, you’re given two folders, that’s a red flag. If you’re considering taking a contract for a lot of money overseas, you’re probably not taking the job you think you’re taking.”
Desautels compared competitors’ practices to “testing a bulletproof vest with a squirt gun.” In his book, they were con artists, bilking clients for tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of dollars, and failing to keep hackers out.
And if they failed, then they had to “clean fail”—meaning they couldn’t trigger a security alert or crash a target’s computer. No one could know they were being hacked.
Before he ventured out, he painted over the screws on his laptop with his wife’s nail polish. It seemed paranoid, but by now he knew he had legitimate reasons to worry. If shadier players were coming into the industry, the shadiest were in Russia. Sure enough, when he returned, the polish was cracked. Someone had tampered with his laptop.
Vincenzetti said his firm had even set up a board—comprised of engineers and human rights lawyers—with veto power over any sale. But as I sorted through Vincenzetti’s hacked emails, it was clear the company had been lying to me all along.
South Korean journalists found emails showing that Hacking Team’s spyware may have helped South Korean’s intelligence operatives rig an election. (One South Korean agent who used Hacking Team’s spyware committed suicide after his emails were made public.)
was learning that nobody in this trade ever seemed to take a stance until it was too late.)
Pegasus could even do what NSO called “room tap”: gather sounds and snapshots in and around the room using the phone’s microphone and video camera.
One of the few tells that you may have spyware on your device is a constantly draining battery.
They charged a flat $500,000 installation fee, then another $650,000 to hack just ten iPhones or ten Android phones. Their clients could hack an additional hundred targets for $800,000; fifty extra targets cost $500,000; twenty, $250,000; and ten extra cost $150,000.
Together the researchers had taken to calling Mansoor the “million-dollar dissident”; clearly the UAE security apparatus deemed him worthy of seven figures worth of spyware. By then Mansoor’s life was already a living hell. A mild-mannered poet, he had earned a bachelor’s in electrical engineering and a master’s in telecommunications in the United States at the University of Colorado Boulder, which gave him his first true taste of a free society. In 2011, as the Emiratis began clamping down on even the mildest form of dissent, Mansoor could not let it go. Together with a group of Emirati
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Two years later, the state decided it was time to shut him up for good. In a secret trial in May 2018, Mansoor was convicted of damaging the country’s “social harmony and unity,” sentenced to ten years in jail, and has spent much of the past two years in solitary confinement. He has no bed, no mattress, no sunshine, and, in what must be particularly painful for him, no books. Last I heard, his health was declining. Due to prolonged isolation in a small cell, he can no longer walk. And yet, somehow, he is still fighting. After a particularly gruesome beating, he went on hunger strike. He was
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I struggled to make sense of what the callers had in common. Eventually, after some digging, I came to this: each had been a vocal proponent of Mexico’s soda tax, the first national soda tax of its kind. On its face, the soda tax made a lot of sense. Mexico is Coca-Cola’s biggest consumer market; it is also a country where diabetes and obesity kill more people than violent crime. But the tax had opponents in the soda industry, and clearly somebody working in government didn’t want their kickbacks getting cut off.
It was Putin’s playbook through and through. The Kremlin had successfully outsourced cyberattacks to Russian cybercriminals for years. It was a strategy that was easily imported to China, where the state’s embrace of liberties and free markets had its limits. Those with any notable hacking skills weren’t so much recruited to the state’s hacking apparatus as they were conscripted.
Li had apparently googled himself and didn’t like what he saw, according to leaked diplomatic cables. As a result, Li sought to punish Google, first by ordering state-owned Chinese telecoms to stop doing business with the company, and later by coordinating the contracted hit on Google’s networks
Along with prodemocracy activists, China considers Tibetans, Uighur Muslims, pro-independence Taiwanese, and Falun Gong practitioners to be what the state calls the Five Poisons
The alternative, they argued, was to leave a billion people in the dark. Such rationalization was common in Silicon Valley, where tech leaders and founders have come to think of themselves as prophets, if not deities, delivering free speech and the tools of self-expression to the masses and thereby changing the world.
As a matter of policy, the Soviet Union was not anti-Semitic. But in practice, Jews were banned from Russia’s prestigious universities and upper professional ranks.
As Beijing woke that morning, many made their way to Google headquarters to leave flowers outside in a show of gratitude or mourning for what everyone knew was likely to be Google’s imminent exit.
It deployed giant “fuzz farms” of thousands of computers to throw massive amounts of junk code at Google’s software for days on end, in search of code that broke under the load.
By 2020 Bekrar was offering $1.5 million for exploits that could remotely access someone’s WhatsApp messages and Apple’s iMessages without so much as a click.
In any market, there is a fool. It had recently occurred to Shatner that he was the fool. There are no copyright laws for zero-days, no patents on exploits. He told me he spent months developing an exploit for a firewall, but when he submitted it, they rejected it. “Raytheon told me, ‘It didn’t work.’ Then a year later, I learned from a friend at the company that they’d been using my exploit for months.
Back in 2011, a whistleblower tipped off the Pentagon that its security software was riddled with Russian backdoors. The Pentagon had paid Computer Sciences Corporation—the same megacontractor that now owns VRL—$613 million to secure its systems. CSC, in turn, subcontracted the actual coding to a Massachusetts outfit called NetCracker Technology, which farmed it out to programmers in Moscow.
They drafted a list of one hundred successful companies around Silicon Valley, and one week later they’d hacked them all. On average, it took fifteen minutes each.
Moussouris started spending her off hours studying game theory to understand various incentive models and their downsides. Microsoft might never compete with the government market, but she also knew that money wasn’t hackers’ main motivator. She grouped their motivations into three categories: compensation, recognition, and the “pursuit of intellectual happiness.”
tech companies had never heard of Prism. Yes, they complied with narrow, court-ordered requests for specific customer accounts and metadata, but the notion that they were somehow NSA collaborators, handing the agency real-time access to customers’ private communications, was flat-out wrong. Their denials, however, were complicated by the fact that, legally, they were forbidden from disclosing the full nature of their cooperation and resistance to the secret court orders.
Bounties entailed psychological hurdles for executives. If they could manage the back-end logistics and the payments and offer a trusted platform through which hackers might engage with companies across industries, they could make a far greater dent in the exploit stockpiles than they could working from their respective siloes.
At the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which regulates nuclear facilities, information about crucial nuclear components was left on unsecured network drives, and the agency had lost track of laptops with critical data.
Computers at the IRS allowed employees to use weak passwords like “password.” One report detailed 7,329 vulnerabilities because the agency hadn’t even bothered to install software patches. At the Department of Education, which stores data from millions of student loan applicants, auditors were able to connect rogue computers to the network without being noticed.
In the vast bureaucracy that was the Department of Defense, one agency was now paying hackers to patch its holes, while others were paying them far more to keep the world’s holes wide open.
Cook was famously private himself. He had grown up gay in conservative Alabama, a fact he kept private until 2014, the year after the Snowden revelations dropped. In Alabama, his lingering childhood memory was watching Klansmen burn a cross on the lawn of a black family in his neighborhood while chanting racial slurs. He’d screamed at the men to stop, and when one of the men lifted his white hood, Cook recognized him as the deacon of a local church.
ISIS was taking refuge in encrypted apps and using social media to coordinate its attacks and recruit sympathizers in Europe, the UK, and the United States.
How could the U.S. government ever guarantee it could keep Apple’s backdoor safe, when it could not even manage to protect its own data?
