Some people see dominoes as a game of blind luck that depends on what tiles you draw and what tiles other players lay down. This isn’t really the case: Dominoes is actually a game in which skill and strategy are important, and so one of the more important factors in playing dominoes is keeping your tiles close at hand.
2 February 2022 (Malta) – Quite an image right? The New York Times, the flabby dowager of real news, is riding the Pegasus. “FBI Secretly Bought Israeli Spyware and Explored Hacking US Phones” reveals that, like most investigative units in the world, tested the specialized software and services available from organizations once shrouded in secrecy. Secrets no more. It seems that NSO Group’s secrets are more widely shared that Minnie Mouse’s hip new blue jump suit. The Gray Lady states:
The F.B.I., in a deal never previously reported, bought the spyware in 2019, despite multiple reports that it had been used against activists and political opponents in other countries. It also spent two years discussing whether to deploy a newer product, called Phantom, inside the United States.
Are you frightened yet? I am not. I expect government agencies to acquire, test, and implement tools necessary to obtain mission objectives. This is what law enforcement and intelligence units do. Most of the tested specialized software and systems are discontinued or not used – as the FBI admitted yesterday. Some useful tools are never used because the budget no longer permits assigning a full time employee to remain current on a system. The write up is less about the research done by government agencies and more about the outrage that some feel. My hunch is that the Gray Lady’s “real news” professionals are among the most put upon by what is a routine function.
And the news? The Gray Lady wants to ride the Pegasus, but the tired, old, beaten down Pegasus is not able to get the flaccid passenger aloft. It’s old news.
Much more relevant is the piece “The Company Trying to Give Cyber Intel a Good Name”. The somewhat lofty goal of the write up is to put a bit of lipstick on what is now a somewhat unattractive pig. I don’t have an animal in the fight, although the image of squabbling pigs strikes me as amusing. Maybe a cyber version of “Animal Farm”?
The article contains lots of interesting factoids worth some thoughts as clearly the game is afoot. Just a few gems:
• NSO Group is still for sale with a valuation of about $1.0 billion US.
• NSO Group technology “makes it possible, at the push of a button, to take over a telephone remotely, record conversations via its microphone, film via its camera, or determine its location, without its owner knowing.”
• Israeli police have been criticized for its use of technology like NSO Group’s.
• “Crime organizations use encrypted communications, on apps such as Telegram and Signal, and in countries like Russia and China the problem has been solved very simply: giant US companies like Google and Meta, and Chinese ones like WeChat and Weibo, provide the authorities with the key to read chat or listen to voice calls on their apps without having to break the encryption.” [Note to my cyber readers: I have covered this in previous posts.]
• “… European countries were pioneers of planting Trojan horses and developing vulnerabilities for hacking telephones, among them Italian company Hacking Team, which was shut down – but then simply re-emerged as Memento Labs, and Amesys…”
• Germany “bought a system from NSO”
• “Israeli company Quadream is selling to Middle Eastern and African countries systems with capabilities similar to those of NSO, in collaboration with a Cypriot sales company InReach Technologies, while Cognyte, formerly the offensive cyber division of Verint, is already developing the next generation of its Trojan horses in a secret division called Ace Labs.”
• “One company trying to adapt to the new era is Paragon Solutions, an offensive cyber company founded two-and-a-half years ago by former IDF intelligence unit 8200 commander Ehud Schneerson, and Idan Nurick and Igor Bogudlov, who served in the unit, together with former prime minister Ehud Barak.”
• Paragon will sell to customers in 39 countries which have to be “enlightened democracies”.
• Paragon has “American DNA” and money from Battery Ventures
• Paragon “has grown to 110 employees, most of them people recently demobilized from the IDF who served in 8200’s cyber units [the high-level Israeli intelligence operations], and the rest former employees of companies like NSO, Check Point, Cobwebs Technologies, and Cyberbit.”
Now what is that game again? Oh, right: dominoes. That’s the blocking game, right?