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Journalist's phone hacked by new ‘invisible' technique: All he had to do was visit one website. Any website. | |
2020-06-28 | |
[The Star Canada] The white iPhone with chipped paint that Moroccan journalist Omar Radi used to stay in contact with his sources also allowed his government to spy on him. They could read every email, text and website visited; listen to every phone call and watch every video conference; download calendar entries, monitor GPS coordinates, and even turn on the camera and microphone to see and hear where the phone was at any moment. Yet Radi was trained in encryption and cyber security. He hadn’t clicked on any suspicious links and didn’t have any missed calls on WhatsApp — both well-documented ways a cell phone can be hacked. Instead, a report published Monday by Amnesty International shows Radi was targeted by a new and frighteningly stealthy technique. All he had to do was visit one website. Any website. Forensic evidence gathered by Amnesty International on Radi’s phone shows that it was infected by "network injection," a fully automated method where an attacker intercepts a cellular signal when it makes a request to visit a website. In milliseconds, the web browser is diverted to a malicious site and spyware code is downloaded that allows remote access to everything on the phone. The browser then redirects to the intended website and the user is none the wiser.
Forensic evidence gathered by Amnesty International on Radi’s phone shows that it was infected by "network injection," a fully automated method where an attacker intercepts a cellular signal when it makes a request to visit a website. The episode reveals not that authoritarian governments are actively listening to the calls, monitoring the web traffic and reading the emails of journalists and human rights activists — but that they can do so undetected. "I kind of suspected (I was hacked)," said Radi on an encrypted video chat from Rabat. "The Moroccan authorities are buying every possible and imaginable surveillance and espionage product. They want to know everything." Radi is an investigative journalist who co-founded the local news site Le Desk, a partner with the Star in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. He specializes in the connections between politicians and business people as well as social movements and human rights. In other words, he’s a thorn in the government’s side and a prime target for surveillance, hacking and harassment. In 2017, he was arrested while reporting on a security crackdown in the Rif region, and again this past December after one of his tweets described a local judge as an "executioner." "I was prosecuted for contempt of court, but that’s just the official charge. In fact, I was punished for my entire body of work. They pile things up and then they look for a pretext to arrest," he told Forbidden Stories, an investigative journalism group that coordinated this report with the Star and 14 other outlets. Radi spent a week in pretrial detention, was later convicted to four months and is currently out pending appeal. Related: Amnesty International: 2020-06-12 European Court of Human Rights Faults France over Israel Boycott Convictions Amnesty International: 2020-06-01 Iran suggests up to 225 killed in November fuel price hike protests Amnesty International: 2020-05-31 Three Iranian soldiers killed in clashes along border | |
Posted by:Frank G |
#5 who decides who's an "activist journalist"? Self-announced. Followed by grant applications from George Soros’ Open Society to support his work until he gets a Pulitzer. |
Posted by: trailing wife 2020-06-28 23:31 |
#4 Really. And who decides who's an "activist journalist"? The State. |
Posted by: Varmint the Anonymous8123 2020-06-28 19:54 |
#3 Vegan/PETA journalists beware! |
Posted by: DooDahMan 2020-06-28 16:21 |
#2 Really. And who decides who's an "activist journalist"? |
Posted by: European Conservative 2020-06-28 16:16 |
#1 The Israelis shared this tech with us some years ago. At a discount too, fantastic chaps. Great front end too. Easy and very 'god like'. Amnesty has been after them for a while, instigated by a Soros funded group called Open Computing. It's very necessary in this world. An activist journalist deserves zero privacy anyway. |
Posted by: Dron66046 2020-06-28 07:06 |