The US government warns encryption chipmaker Hualan has suspicious ties to China’s military. Yet US agencies still use one of its subsidiary’s chips, raising fears of a backdoor.

From TikTok to Huawei routers to DJI drones, rising tensions between China and the US have made Americans—and the US government—increasingly wary of Chinese-owned technologies. But thanks to the complexity of the hardware supply chain, encryption chips **sold by the subsidiary of** a company specifically flagged in warnings from the US Department of Commerce for its ties to the Chinese military have found their way into the storage hardware of military and intelligence networks across the West.

In July of 2021, the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security added the Hangzhou, China-based encryption chip manufacturer Hualan Microelectronics, also known as Sage Microelectronics, to its so-called “Entity List,” a vaguely named trade restrictions list that highlights companies “acting contrary to the foreign policy interests of the United States.” Specifically, the bureau noted that Hualan had been added to the list for “acquiring and ... attempting to acquire US-origin items in support of military modernization for \[China's\] People's Liberation Army.”

Yet nearly two years later, Hualan—and in particular its subsidiary known as Initio, a company originally headquartered in Taiwan that it acquired in 2016—still supplies encryption microcontroller chips to Western manufacturers of encrypted hard drives, including several that list as customers on their websites Western governments' aerospace, military, and intelligence agencies: NASA, NATO, and the US and UK militaries. Federal procurement records show that US government agencies from the Federal Aviation Administration to the Drug Enforcement Administration to the US Navy have bought encrypted hard drives that use the chips, too.

The disconnect between the Commerce Department’s warnings and Western government customers means that chips sold by Hualan’s subsidiary have ended up deep inside sensitive Western information networks, perhaps due to the ambiguity of their Initio branding and its Taiwanese origin prior to 2016. The chip vendor’s Chinese ownership has raised fears among security researchers and China-focused national security analysts that they could have a hidden backdoor that would allow China’s government to stealthily decrypt Western agencies’ secrets.

“If a company is on the Entity List, it’s because the US government says this company is actively supporting another country’s military development,” says Dakota Cary, a China-focused research fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington, DC-based think tank. “It's saying you should not be purchasing from them, not just because the money you’re spending is going to a company that will use those proceeds in the furtherance of another country’s military objectives, but because you can’t trust the product.”

Technically, the Entity List is an “export control” list, says Emily Weinstein, a researcher at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology. That means US organizations are forbidden from exporting components _to_ companies on the list, rather than importing components _from_ them. But Cary, Weinstein, and the Commerce Department note that it's often used as a de facto warning to US customers not to buy from a listed foreign company, either. Both networking firm Huawei and drone-maker DJI have been added to the list, for instance, for their alleged ties to the Chinese military. “It’s used somewhat as a blacklist,” says Weinstein. “The Entity List should be a red or maybe a yellow alert to anyone in the US government who’s working with this company to take a second look at this.”

When WIRED reached out to the Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security, a spokesperson responded that the BIS is restricted by law from commenting to the press on specific companies and that a company's unlisted subsidiary—like Initio—isn't technically affected by the Entity List's legal restrictions. But the spokesperson added that “as a general matter, affiliation with an Entity Listed party should be considered a ‘red flag.’”

Hualan's Initio chips are used in encrypted storage devices as so-called bridge controllers, sitting between the USB connection in a storage device and memory chips or magnetic drive to encrypt and decrypt data on a USB thumbdrive or external hard drive. Security researchers' teardowns have shown that storage device manufacturers including Lenovo, Western Digital, Verbatim, and Zalman have all at times used encryption chips sold by Initio.

But three lesser-known hard drive manufacturers, in particular, also integrate the Initio chips and list Western government, military, and intelligence agencies as customers. The Middlesex, UK-based hard drive maker iStorage lists on its website customers including NATO and the UK Ministry of Defence. South Pasadena, California-based SecureDrive lists as customers the US Army and NASA. And US federal procurement records show that Poway, California-based Apricorn has sold its encrypted storage products—which use Initio chips—to NASA, the Navy, the FAA, and the DEA, among many others.

The encryption features enabled by Initio chips in those drives are designed to protect their data against compromise if the drives are physically accessed, lost, or stolen. But the security of that encryption feature essentially depends on trusting the chip's designer, cryptography experts warn. If there were a secret vulnerability or intentional backdoor in the chips, it would allow anyone who lays hands on any drives that use them—drives are often marketed for use “in the field”—to defeat that feature. And that backdoor could be very, very difficult to detect, cryptographers note, even on the closest inspection.

“In the end, it's a matter of trust, whether you actually trust this vendor and its components with all your sensitive data,” says Matthias Deeg, a security researcher at German cybersecurity firm Syss, who has analyzed the Initio chips. “These kinds of microcontrollers are a black box to me and every other researcher trying to understand how this device is working.”

Last year, Deeg analyzed the first firmware of a Verbatim secure USB thumbdrive that uses an Initio chip and found multiple security vulnerabilities: One allowed him to quickly bypass a fingerprint reader or PIN on the drives and access any “administrative” password that had been set for the drives, a master password feature designed to allow IT administrators to decrypt users' devices. Another flaw allowed him to “brute-force” the decryption key for the drives, deriving the key to access their contents in at most 36 hours.

Deeg says that Initio has since fixed those vulnerabilities. But more troubling, he says, was how tough it was to do that analysis of the devices' firmware. The code had no public documentation, and Hualan didn't respond to his requests for more information. Deeg says the lack of transparency points to how difficult it would be to find a hardware-based backdoor in the chips, such as a minuscule component hidden in their physical design to allow for surreptitious decryption.

He notes, too, that there's no way of knowing whether the vulnerabilities he found were accidental. “Is it better to have a hidden backdoor,” Deeg asks, “or one that is more visible but can be attributed to negligence by the developer?”

Hualan didn't respond to WIRED's multiple requests for comment. But iStorage, the UK-based encrypted hard drive maker that uses Initio chips, told WIRED that its storage devices' architecture means that users don't have to trust Hualan or its Initio subsidiary because the private keys used to encrypt and decrypt data stored on them are generated and stored by a separate chip that comes from a different, France-based manufacturer, and the Initio chip never stores that key. “I appreciate concerns with using Chinese technology, but we’re very confident that even though we’re using these chips, our products cannot be hacked, even by Initio or Hualan,” iStorage's CEO John Michael says. (Michael also noted that some of iStorage products use a chip sold by Taiwanese firm Phison instead of Hualan or Initio, but didn't specify which products.)

Even if a bridge controller chip doesn't create a secret key and isn't intended to store it, however, it still has enough access to it to enable a backdoor, says Matthew Green, a cryptography-focused computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University. After all, a bridge controller performs the encryption and decryption using that secret key, and so could either secretly exfiltrate and store it or furtively encrypt the data with its own, different key. “If the chip has the key and does the encryption, there is a possibility of malfeasance,” Green says.

iStorage also passed on a statement from Initio pointing out that Initio isn't specifically named on Commerce's Entity List, and arguing that Hualan's inclusion on the list doesn't apply to Initio. But the Atlantic Council's Cary argues—echoing the Commerce spokesperson's “red flag” comment to WIRED—that wholly owned subsidiaries of companies on the list are generally considered to effectively be on the list, too. “I don’t buy that line of argument,” Cary says of Initio's claim to not be affected by the Entity List, pointing out that otherwise the list's restrictions could be easily circumvented through the use of subsidiary companies. “If the company that owns you is on the Entity List, you’re included.”

WIRED also reached out to Hualan and Initio customers including NATO, NASA, the US Navy and Army, the DEA, and the FAA. Of those that responded, none would comment on what hardware they buy. But statements from NATO, the US Navy, and the UK Ministry of Defence all repeated that they carefully vet the security of the technology they use. “We have policies in place to address supply chain risk management, as well as established security standards to ensure all procured commercial products and services are inspected for security vulnerabilities,” read a statement from the US Navy, for instance. An FAA spokesperson said the agency complies with government regulations like the National Defense Authorization Act related to the purchase of hardware, but didn't answer questions about purchasing components from companies on Commerce's Entity List.

In fact, several of the encrypted hard drives that use Hualan's and Initio's chips tout that they do have cybersecurity certification from the National Institute of Standards and Technology such as the FIPS 140-2 standard. But Johns Hopkins' Green notes that for that level of certification, NIST generally only checks for accidental vulnerabilities in cryptographic products, not intentionally hidden ones created by a determined adversary.

“These backdoors can be so subtle and clever, and there’s so many ways to do them that you may not even see in the code,” Green says. “It would really shock me if any of these tests are assuming an untrusted manufacturer.”

The mere fact that so many Western government agencies are buying products that include chips **sold by the subsidiary of** a company on the Commerce Department's trade restrictions list points to the complexities of navigating the computing hardware supply chain, says the Atlantic Council's Cary. “At minimum, it's a real oversight. Organizations that should be prioritizing this level of security are apparently not able to do so, or are making mistakes that have allowed for these products to get into their environments,” he says. “It seems very significant. And it’s probably not a one-off mistake.”

How Shady Chinese Encryption Chips Got Into the Navy, NATO, and NASA

Fresh claims from a former US intelligence officer about an “intact” alien craft may get traction on Capitol Hill, where some lawmakers want to believe.

The United States Congress is strange enough without aliens, but here we are. Or is it, here they are?

Over a span of several months, members of the 118th Congress have gone from being transfixed by wind-propelled spy balloons to being mesmerized by a whistleblower’s claims that US intelligence officials possess “intact and partially intact non-human aircraft.” The whistleblower, former intelligence officer David Grusch, also claims that this and other evidence are being withheld from Congress.

“The allegations themselves are breathtaking,” says Senator Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat. “It could be a game changer, or it could be a crank. I just don't know.”

Whether Grusch proves to be a crank or a game changer will likely soon be investigated by lawmakers from both parties and in both chambers of Congress. Skeptics abound, but there are also lawmakers who are curious and open to proof. Then there are the believers. 

In our strange new political universe of alternative facts turned dystopian reality, once-fringe notions have built-in fan bases in today’s Capitol. And in the House of Representatives, party leaders tapped Grusch’s allies to lead their chamber’s investigation.

On one level, it’s fitting that today’s conspiracy-laced Congress—where anti-vaxxers berate scientists, Election 2020 remains disputed, and January 6 rioters are praised as victims—is now tasked with tackling arguably the nation’s most long-standing conspiracy. But many senators fear their House counterpart’s melding of “deep state” with deep space will only sow more confusion into an electorate hungry for answers, which hearings about unidentified aircraft in recent years have failed to satisfactorily answer.

The Rank and File Are Flying the UAP

The sensational details of Grusch’s claims about so-called unidentified anomalous phenomena (or UAPs—NASA’s new name for UFOs) spread rapidly through the Capitol last week, along with much derision and mockery. Some congressional leaders laughed them off. "This is not a question I had on my bingo card,” House Democratic Caucus chair Pete Aguilar told the press corps. Or they slid these latest ET allegations right into their old talking points. "Obviously, we're concerned about Congress being kept in the dark from a lot of these agencies,” House majority leader Steve Scalise replied before even seeing the whistleblower’s claims.

The response was different among rank-and-file lawmakers, especially in the House, where the Grusch’s unvetted claims were seen as vindication by a small but vocal—and increasingly powerful—faction of far-right lawmakers who are heading up the inquiry ahead of a planned but still unscheduled hearing.

“I think it’s a little bit of madness and a whole lot of reality. I do believe we’ve recovered a craft at some point,” Representative Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, told Steve Bannon on his podcast Wednesday. Burchett believes that the Pentagon’s budget is bloated, in part, because it’s funding secret UAP programs. His personal belief in UAPs stems from the 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico.  

When Grusch’s report dropped, some members of today’s far-right immediately suspected it was a false flag planted by the deep state. “We kind of felt, with everything going on, this is like the biggest misdirection play in history,” Bannon told Burchett. Their fears appear to have largely dissipated, however, with Burchett and his far-right allies now all-in on the investigation.  

Burchett told Bannon he “has a commitment” from both House speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Oversight Committee chair James Comer to hold a hearing on UAPs, though he says it’s not a top priority for party leaders. “We’re only going to get about one bite at the apple,” Burchett said.

If the Pentagon—which vigorously denies the whistleblower’s charges of a secret UAP program—or NASA officials ask to brief lawmakers behind closed doors, which is common when classified information is discussed, Burchett’s not interested. “I'm not gonna be a part of it if it's classified. That's ridiculous,” Burchett said on the podcast. “That's just more of the same and creates more myths and rumors than it creates facts.”

Burchett is joined by two Florida Republican representatives: Matt Gaetz—“I have seen evidence of craft that I am not familiar with any of our allies or adversaries or even our country possessing”—and Anna Paulina Luna, who believes the government has been lying to the public about UAP’s “for decades.”

While Luna and Burchett will likely head up the House inquiry and eventual hearing, it’s not just fringe-right members whose ears perked up over these allegations. This includes Representative Mike McCaul, a Texas Republican and chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “It’s a legitimate issue. On both sides, we just want to know if we've been seeing \[UAPs\] that are not man-made—is what the article said, but I don't know,” he says. “But that's a good question for the chairman” of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

That’s why one of McCaul’s first reactions to the article was to forward it to the House Intelligence Committee chair, Mike Turner, whose office didn’t reply to multiple requests for comment.

The Senate Has Questions  

The Senate has also shown interest in UAPs in recent years, and the increased pressure on federal officials has produced results—including a massive spike in the number of UAPs the government monitors.   

In its June 2021 report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence disclosed 144 UAP sightings stretching back nearly two decades. After years of mounting smartphone evidence, unanswered questions, and frustrated lawmakers, the military unveiled its newly rebooted and renamed All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO; pronounced “arrow”). 

With a department mandated with tracking secrets in the skies, sightings skyrocketed. Last August, AARO officials disclosed more than 500 reports of UAPs. By this April, there were some 650 cases. And just last month, the Pentagon, which oversees AARO, hiked the number to roughly 800 mysterious flying objects. 

While Grusch’s claims of alien life and recovered craft have made headlines, senators are alarmed by accusations that the federal government is hiding Special Access Programs from Congress.

“We need to just look into whether there are rogue SAP programs that no one is providing oversight for,” says Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who led the Senate’s April UAP hearing. “The goal for me will be to have a hearing on that at some point so that we can assess if these SAP’s actually exist.”

Gillibrand is sponsoring an amendment she hopes to attach to this year’s must-pass National Defense Authorization Act to mandate that no money can be spent on SAP’s unless it's been reported to Congress. “So if there are SAPs out there that are somehow outside of the normal chain of command and outside the normal appropriations process, they have to divulge that to Congress,” Gilibrand says.

As for whether she thinks there’s any veracity to the whistleblower’s claims? “I have no idea,” Gillibrand says. “So I'm going to do the work and analyze it and figure it out.”

Other senators say there isn’t much to figure out. “Generally, I would look skeptically at many of these reports,” says Senator Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat who serves on the Intelligence Committee. While Heinrich remains dubious of the whistleblower, he says UAPs are a conundrum the federal government must address.

“What I take seriously is sometimes we just have these really good, decorated pilots and navigating officers who are experiencing things that we can't explain, so we need to collect data so that we can figure out what is going on,” Heinrich says.

Still, among other senators, radio silence. WIRED sent an inquiry to Senate Intelligence Committee chair Mark Warner; in less than a minute, the Virginia Democrat’s staff replied, “We’re a no comment on this—thank you!”

When we caught the senator in the Capitol’s marble halls, Warner kept tripping over his own thoughts. “There's been a lot of incoming. Frankly, I just need to find out more information on this,” Warner says.

As for the accusation that the federal government has lied to Congress and hidden some SAPs for decades?  “We've heard these accusations before,” Warner says, before stopping himself, again. “Let me get some information first.”

“None of It’s Good”

Lawmakers are still awaiting more answers on the spy balloons that dominated the news—and American air space—at the start of the year, especially in regard to the four objects the Air Force shot down within an eight-day period this February. In the wake of those military engagements, the Biden administration held closed-door classified briefings for members of Congress, but they were less than straightforward, at least initially, until lawmakers pushed officials on UAPs.

“They were talking about the balloons, and then several senators pointed out, ‘Now hold on: We’ve had a lot of unidentified anomalous phenomenon for years now,’ and that’s when the military briefer was like, ‘True. True,’” says Senator Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican. “The takeaway from that is, they had thousands of sightings of these things over the years, which was news to me. So I'm not surprised, necessarily, by these latest allegations, because it sounds pretty close to what they kind of grudgingly admitted to us in the briefing.”

While not necessarily surprised by Grusch’s claims, lawmakers of all stripes are disturbed by reports of UAPs hovering over US military sites.

“It’s not good. None of it’s good,” Hawley says. “I think we want to get to the bottom of this. I think it’s disturbing.”

UFO Whistleblower, Meet a Conspiracy-Loving Congress

A newly declassified report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence reveals that the federal government is buying troves of data about Americans.

The United States government has been secretly amassing a “large amount” of “sensitive and intimate information” on its own citizens, a group of senior advisers informed Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, more than a year ago. 

The size and scope of the government effort to accumulate data revealing the minute details of Americans' lives are described soberly and at length by the director's own panel of experts in a newly declassified report. Haines had first tasked her advisers in late 2021 with untangling a web of secretive business arrangements between commercial data brokers and US intelligence community members. 

What that report ended up saying constitutes a nightmare scenario for privacy defenders. 

“This report reveals what we feared most,” says Sean Vitka, a policy attorney at the nonprofit Demand Progress. “Intelligence agencies are flouting the law and buying information about Americans that Congress and the Supreme Court have made clear the government should not have.” 

In the shadow of years of inaction by the US Congress on comprehensive privacy reform, a surveillance state has been quietly growing in the legal system's cracks. Little deference is paid by prosecutors to the purpose or intent behind limits traditionally imposed on domestic surveillance activities. More craven interpretations of aging laws are widely used to ignore them. As the framework guarding what privacy Americans do have grows increasingly frail, opportunities abound to split hairs in court over whether such rights are even enjoyed by our digital counterparts.

“I’ve been warning for years that if using a credit card to buy an American’s personal information voids their Fourth Amendment rights, then traditional checks and balances for government surveillance will crumble,” Ron Wyden, a US senator from Oregon, says. 

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) did not immediately respond to a request for comment. WIRED was unable to reach any members of the senior advisory panel, whose names have been redacted in the report. Former members have included ex-CIA officials of note and top defense industry leaders.

Wyden had pressed Haines, previously the number two at the Central Intelligence Agency, to release the panel's report during a March 8 hearing. Haines replied at the time that she believed it “absolutely” should be read by the public. On Friday, the report was declassified and released by the ODNI, which has been embroiled in a legal fight with the digital rights nonprofit the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) over a host of related documents. 

“This report makes it clear that the government continues to think it can buy its way out of constitutional protections using taxpayers’ own money," says Chris Baumohl, a law fellow at EPIC. “Congress must tackle the government’s data broker pipeline this year, before it considers any reauthorization of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” he said (referring to the ongoing political fight over the so-called “crown jewel” of US surveillance). 

The ODNI's own panel of advisers makes clear that the government’s static interpretations of what constitutes “publicly available information” poses a significant threat to the public. The advisers decry existing policies that automatically conflate, in the first place, being able to buy information with it being considered “public.” The information being commercially sold about Americans today is “more revealing, available on more people (in bulk), less possible to avoid, and less well understood” than that which is traditionally thought of as being “publicly available.”

Perhaps most controversially, the report states that the government believes it can “persistently” track the phones of “millions of Americans” without a warrant, so long as it pays for the information. Were the government to simply demand access to a device's location instead, it would be considered a Fourth Amendment “search” and would require a judge's sign-off. But because companies are willing to sell the information—not only to the US government but to other companies as well—the government considers it “publicly available” and therefore asserts that it “can purchase it.”

It is no secret, the report adds, that it is often trivial “to deanonymize and identify individuals” from data that was packaged as ethically fine for commercial use because it had been “anonymized” first. Such data may be useful, it says, to “identify every person who attended a protest or rally based on their smartphone location or ad-tracking records.” Such civil liberties concerns are prime examples of how “large quantities of nominally ‘public’ information can result in sensitive aggregations.” What's more, information collected for one purpose “may be reused for other purposes,” which may “raise risks beyond those originally calculated,” an effect called “mission creep.” 

Most Americans have at least some idea of how a law enforcement investigation unfolds (if only from watching years of police procedurals). This idea imagines a cop whose ability to surveil them, turn their phone into a tracking device, or start squeezing records out of businesses they frequent, are all gated behind evidentiary thresholds, like reasonable doubt and probable cause. 

These are legal hurdles that no longer bother an increasing number of government agencies. 

Access to the most sensitive information about a person was once usually obtained in the course of a “targeted” and “predicated” investigation, the report says. Not anymore. “Today, in a way that far fewer Americans seem to understand, and even fewer of them can avoid, \[commercially available information\] includes information on nearly everyone,” it says. Both the “volume and sensitivity” of information the government can purchase has exploded in recent years due to “location-tracking and other features of smartphones,” and the “advertising-based monetization model” that underlies much of the internet, the report says. 

“In the wrong hands,” the ODNI’s advisers warn, the same mountain of data the government is quietly accumulating could be turned against Americans to “facilitate blackmail, stalking, harassment, and public shaming.” Notably, these are all offenses that have been committed by intelligence agencies and White House administrations in the past. What constraints do exist on domestic surveillance activities are all a direct response to that history of political sabotage, disinformation, and abusive violations of Americans' rights. 

The report notes: “The government would never have been permitted to compel billions of people to carry location tracking devices on their persons at all times, to log and track most of their social interactions, or to keep flawless records of all their reading habits. Yet smartphones, connected cars, web tracking technologies, the Internet of Things, and other innovations have had this effect without government participation.”

The government must appreciate that all of this unfettered access can quickly increase its own power “to peer into private lives to levels that may exceed our constitutional traditions or other social expectations,” the advisers say, even if it can't blind itself to the fact that all this information exists and is readily sold for a buck.

The US Is Openly Stockpiling Dirt on All Its Citizens

Personal information, including ID documents and phone numbers, have been released on Telegram.

On the evening of June 11, a journalist from the Kerala-based news portal The Fourth reported that a Telegram bot in a channel called “hak4learn” was offering access to the private data of millions of Indians. All a user had to do was put in a phone number or Aadhaar (India’s national ID) number, and it would return details including their name, passport number, and date of birth. The data appears to have come from India’s CoWIN vaccination tracking app, which has more than 1 billion registered users.

“The scale of the data breach is what makes it hard to guess the repercussions,” says Srikanth Lakshmanan, a researcher who runs the digital payments collective Cashless Consumer. “Conservative estimates mean at least personal data of several hundred million users was exposed.”

Local news outlets have been able to use the bot to access the personal information of politicians. WIRED couldn’t independently verify their reporting; by the morning of June 12 the bot was inactive. The fact that it has shut down doesn’t mean the breach is over, Lakshmanan says, since the bot was likely just a shop window for whoever accessed the database.

“Usually, hackers reveal a slice of data publicly via a bot or web page to prove to the world they have said data and then sell it on the dark web,” Lakshmanan says. “While the bot is down now, we don't know where all the data is being traded."

India’s digital public infrastructure has expanded massively over the past several  years, with the growing popularity of the Aadhaar identity system, the proliferation of the digital payments system United Payments Interface, and the launch of CoWIN.

This growth has meant that there is a vast amount of public data on file, but digital rights experts worry that cybersecurity and legal frameworks around data storage haven’t kept pace with the growth.

“The data involved with government entities is organically very large,” says Tejasi Panjiar, an associate counsel at the Internet Freedom Foundation, an organization that advocates for digital rights. “Which is why there needs to be very strict data-security standards for government-based entities.”

Panjiar further said that the concern is that India doesn’t have a cybersecurity policy and that even the current data-protection framework “takes away that aspect of compensation that affected users would get,” making such leaks an even bigger cause for concern. “I think it's a time for worry for everyone who's been vaccinated through CoWIN,” added Panjiar.

The health ministry has said that claims that the CoWIN portal has been breached are “without any basis” and that the Computer Emergency Response Team, the agency responsible for responding to cybersecurity incidents, has been asked to investigate.

India’s IT minister, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, tweeted that the data accessed by the bot is from a “threat actor database” and that “it does not appear that CoWIN app or database has been directly breached.”

An independent report by digital risk monitoring platform CloudSEK seems to validate this to some extent. The company’s research suggests that rather than having access to the entire CoWIN database or backend, the hackers may have instead gotten hold of multiple credentials from health workers, allowing them more limited access to records.

“What CloudSEK knows with high confidence is that threat actors have access to multiple credentials that belong to health workers that could be used to access the CoWIN portal for those individual health workers and the data they have access to,” says Rahul Sasi, chief executive of CloudSEK. “What we also speculate is some sort of unauthenticated API that would have allowed attackers to query specific user details. But there is no proof at this point of time.”

CoWIN was launched in January 2021 as the foundation of India’s vaccination drive. The platform, which was also available as a mobile app, was used by people to book their vaccination slots and generate a vaccination certificate for themselves and their family members. The government at the time was criticized for making CoWIN the only way for Indians to book a vaccination appointment, excluding millions who didn’t have access to a smartphone or the internet.

This isn’t the first time the news of a CoWIN database has surfaced. In 2021, Dark Leak Market, a hacker group, said it had access to the data of 150 million Indians registered on CoWIN. The health ministry denied the claims, saying the platform stores “all the data in a safe and secure digital environment.” At the time, cybersecurity researchers said they suspected the “leak” was a scam.

A Massive Vaccine Database Leak Exposes IDs of Millions of Indians

A court used an app called Covenant Eyes to surveil the family of a man released on bond. Now he’s back in jail, and tech misuse may be to blame.

On a Wednesday morning in May, Hannah got a call from her lawyer—there was a warrant out for her husband’s arrest. Her thoughts went straight to her kids. They were going to come home from school and their father would be gone. “It burned me,” Hannah says, her voice breaking. “He hasn’t done anything to get his bond revoked, and they couldn’t prove he had.”

Hannah’s husband is now awaiting trial in jail, in part because of an anti-pornography app called Covenant Eyes. The company explicitly says the app is not meant for use in criminal proceedings, but the probation department in Indiana’s Monroe County has been using it for the past month to surveil not only Hannah’s husband but also the devices of everyone in their family. To protect their privacy, WIRED is not disclosing their surname or the names of individual family members. Hannah agreed to use her nickname.

Prosecutors in Monroe County this spring charged Hannah’s husband with possession of child sexual abuse material—a serious crime that she says he did not commit and to which he pleaded not guilty. Given the nature of the charges, the court ordered that he not have access to any electronic devices as a condition of his pretrial release from jail. To ensure he complied with those terms, the probation department installed Covenant Eyes on Hannah’s phone, as well as those of her two children and her mother-in-law. 

In near real time, probation officers are being fed screenshots of everything Hannah’s family views on their devices. From images of YouTube videos watched by her 14-year-old daughter to online underwear purchases made by her 80-year-old mother-in-law, the family’s entire digital life is scrutinized by county authorities. “I’m afraid to even communicate with our lawyer,” Hannah says. “If I mention anything about our case, I’m worried they are going to see it and use it against us.”

Covenant Eyes is part of a multimillion-dollar market of “accountability” apps sold to churches and parents as a tool to police online activity. For a monthly fee, the app monitors every single thing a user does on their devices, then sends the data it collects, including screenshots, to an “ally” or “accountability partner,” who can review the user’s online activities.

For Hannah’s family, their Covenant Eyes “allies” are two probation officers in Monroe County’s Pretrial Services Program charged with scrutinizing their web activity and ensuring that Hannah’s husband does not violate the terms of his bond while using one of his family members’ devices.

Covenant Eyes doesn’t permit its software to be used in a “premeditated legal setting,” such as monitoring people on probation, according to its terms of service. But public spending documents, court records, and interviews show that courts in at least five US states have used Covenant Eyes to surveil the devices of people who are awaiting trial or released on parole.  

Neither Covenant Eyes nor multiple officials in Monroe County responded to repeated requests for comment and detailed questions about the app’s monitoring.

While the use of Covenant Eyes in a criminal-legal setting likely only represents a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of people under court-ordered electronic surveillance, the stakes are still high for those required to use it. The app’s accuracy could determine whether a loved one lives at home or behind bars. Legal experts say that its use raises serious constitutional and due process concerns.  

“This is the most extreme type of monitoring that I’ve seen,” says Pilar Weiss, founder of the National Bail Fund Network, a network of over 90 community bail and bond funds across the United States. “It’s part of a disturbing trend where deep surveillance and social control applications are used pretrial with little oversight.”

“It Felt Like Entrapment”

The Covenant Eyes app was developed by Michael Holm, a former National Security Agency mathematician who now works as a data scientist for the company. It captures everything visible on a device’s screen, taking at least one screenshot per minute.  It then analyzes the screenshots locally before slightly blurring them and saving them on a server. Images the system marks as possibly “explicit” are flagged for further review. For example, one Covenant Eyes report sent to Hannah’s probation officer, which WIRED reviewed, flagged an online advertisement for a back brace that included a woman in a tank top as “potentially concerning.” 

The app also monitors every network request a device makes, blocking allegedly pornographic content and alerting allies about requests the software deems suspicious.

The day her husband was released on bond, Hannah sat down with their kids and tried to explain how all of their devices were going to be monitored: The probation department would see anything they looked at on their phones and assume it was their father using the device. The constant surveillance had an immediate impact on the family, Hannah says.

Hannah began skipping her online therapy sessions, fearing that the probation officers would snoop on what she told her doctor. She says her 12-year-old son approached her a half-dozen times to ask things like, “Mom, will Pocket Mortys get dad in trouble?” Her daughter was afraid to text with her friends, worrying that if she used bad language, her father could end up in jail. “It was like the family was being charged with a crime,” Hannah says. “It felt like entrapment.” 

While the images in the Covenant Eyes reports that WIRED reviewed are partially blurred, it is sometimes possible to discern sensitive information from them. For instance, one Covenant Eyes report shows a screenshot of Hannah’s mother-in-law’s device while a phone call was in progress. The report clearly shows the name of the person being contacted. Another shows screenshots of Hannah’s mother-in-law’s bank statements and her Gmail inbox, although the sensitive details in both are unreadable.

Covenant Eyes doesn’t just block pornography. Though the app is designed to block traffic to adult sites, Hannah shared reports that show she was unable to access The Appeal, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on injustice in the criminal-legal system. 

Molly Greene, The Appeal’s strategy and legal director, calls the censorship alarming. “It’s incredibly concerning to hear readers say they can no longer access our website as a result of this app,” she says. ​​“This kind of abuse of judicial power to restrict people’s autonomy and ability to access critical information on the criminal legal system is exactly why The Appeal exists.”

Less than a week after Covenant Eyes was installed on the four phones in her household, Hannah got a call from her husband’s probation officer saying that her husband had violated the terms of his bond. According to Hannah, the officer said Covenant Eyes detected that her phone had visited Pornhub. Court records WIRED reviewed cite a visit to the adult website as the reason for revoking his bond.

But Hannah claims that her husband didn’t touch her phone and that no one had visited Pornhub. Instead, she says, her phone had made a network request to the website’s servers as part of a background app refresh from a frequently visited tab on her Chrome browser.

WIRED tested Hannah’s claims that Covenant Eyes flags background network activity from websites that aren’t intentionally viewed. Using an iPhone, we visited Pornhub enough times that it was a frequently visited tab on Google Chrome. We then installed Covenant Eyes and restarted our phone. Within minutes, Covenant Eyes alerted our designated accountability partner that a request to Pornhub was made from our test device, even though we never touched it. 

This is a known issue with Covenant Eyes. The alert Covenant Eyes sent when it detected a network request to Pornhub explicitly stated that the software cannot determine if the user “intentionally viewed” the webpage because “some apps generate activity in the background without the member’s consent.” The company has public documentation about the shortcoming. 

This limitation in Covenant Eyes means it’s possible Hannah’s husband did not violate the terms of his bond. Moreover, the terms of her husband’s bond don’t prohibit Hannah from looking at pornography, and it would be impossible for probation officers to know who was using the device from Covenant Eyes reports alone. Yet, in the motion to revoke Hannah’s husband’s bond, the only evidence prosecutors presented was information from the Covenant Eyes report.

According to Kate Weisburd, an associate professor at George Washington University School of Law, challenging probation and parole violations is difficult, particularly when they’re based on electronic evidence. Courts are largely reluctant to find due process problems with electronic surveillance, she says, and overworked defense attorneys often lack the capacity to bring a challenge.

Hannah printed the Covenant Eyes documentation and hand-delivered it to the prosecutors, the judge, and the probation department. She never heard back. As a last resort, Hannah emailed Covenant Eyes CEO Ron DeHaas. In an email exchange Hannah shared with WIRED, DeHaas was apologetic. “Hannah, I’m sorry that you are going through this,” DeHaas wrote. “I will have our legal department follow up with you.”

Hannah says the legal department never reached out.

Constitutional Wrongs

Jonathan Manes, an attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center’s Illinois office, says the surveillance Hannah’s family faces likely violates several of their constitutional rights. “This feels like an extraordinarily intrusive violation of the family’s First Amendment rights to be able to access the internet and communicate without being monitored,” he says. Manes adds that because the software effectively enables continuous and suspicionless searches of the devices of people who haven’t been charged with a crime, the family’s Fourth Amendment rights were potentially violated. 

Lastly, Manes points out that by indiscriminately surveilling whatever the phone is displaying, the app could collect sensitive data that includes the family’s communications with their lawyers, as Hannah feared. “It’s interfering with his right to speak in confidence with his attorney,” he says of Hannah’s husband. “It’s impeding his ability to prepare a defense and exercise that Sixth Amendment right.”

“This strikes me as quite chilling,” Manes adds. “It’s what happens when someone’s home becomes their jail cell, and now everyone they live with is subject to the same kind of surveillance as the person who is charged.”

Several legal experts expressed concern about the monitoring conditions imposed by the judge in Hannah’s husband’s case. But Phyllis Emerick, the chief deputy public defender in Monroe County, argues that because Hannah’s husband and his family consented to the surveillance, they gave up their rights to privacy. “He agreed that he would not access electronic devices in his household in exchange for release,” she says. “It was the family’s choice to continue living with him.”

Weiss, of the National Bail Fund Network, disagrees with the idea that any type of surveillance is permissible so long as a person agrees to it to avoid jail time. “Sure, they consented to this, but it’s at the barrel of a gun,” she says. 

The exact number of individuals or families in Monroe County who have been required to use Covenant Eyes as part of their pretrial release is unclear. In the county’s annual report from 2021, the Probation Department stated that they provided pretrial monitoring for 618 individuals; however, the report does not provide details about the specific type of monitoring involved. The number of individuals who were assigned to be monitored by Covenant Eyes is likely a small percentage of that.

Deputy probation officer Troy Hatfield would not answer specific questions about either Covenant Eyes or Hannah’s husband’s case, but he says the conditions of any defendant’s supervision are ultimately decided by the judge based on the specific facts of each case and department policy.  

Neither Monroe’s chief probation officer, Linda Brady, nor the judge in Hannah’s husband’s case, Mary Ellen Diekhoff, responded to repeated requests for interviews.

It’s also unclear exactly how many jurisdictions in the US  have used Covenant Eyes. Court records WIRED reviewed show that courts in Washington, Montana, and Ohio have each ordered a defendant to use the software at least once. In all of these cases, the defendant faced charges related to child sexual abuse material or child exploitation. In Colorado, spending records show that the State Judicial Branch has purchased services from Covenant Eyes 60 times since 2017. 

Multiple probation officer associations, public defense organizations, and bail funds WIRED contacted had never heard of the software and were unfamiliar with any screen-monitoring software being used for pretrial monitoring.

Independent legal experts who spoke to WIRED say that the use of an app like Covenant Eyes stems from a lack of oversight over how courts deploy punitive surveillance technology and judges’ broad authority to impose monitoring conditions without real accountability. 

“There’s a black box around how all of this technology works and is deployed,” says Weisburd, of George Washington University. “We don’t know error rates, how the technology operates, or even if it’s reliable.” This leaves people vulnerable to faulty technology in high-stakes situations where their freedom hinges on the word of an app. 

This includes Hannah’s husband, who remains in jail based on an automated report from an app that is not meant to be used in criminal proceedings and is known to produce false positives. Hannah, meanwhile, is afraid to stop paying $18.99 a month for a subscription with Covenant Eyes, which is still installed on some of her family’s devices, recording everything they do.

An Anti-Porn App Put Him in Jail and His Family Under Surveillance

Documents WIRED obtained detail new prison-monitoring technology that keeps tabs on inmates' location, heartbeats, and more.

The conditions inside the Fulton County Jail system are dire. Inmates at one of the jails in Atlanta, Georgia, are sleeping on the floor in plastic trays. Cell doors hang off hinges, footage from one local news report shows, and leaked water pools on the floor in some areas. Last September, one person was found dead and covered in bed bugs.

The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office, which runs multiple jails around Atlanta and has been granted more funding to fix the problems, is also in the process of rolling out a new surveillance system that can track inmates to precise levels. Across the region’s jails, hundreds of sensors are being embedded into the walls. Using radio frequencies, these communicate with wristbands issued to inmates.

The system, which was created by Georgia-based firm Talitrix, can track an inmate’s heartbeat, determine their location every 30 seconds, and create 3D images showing who comes into contact with whom. Documents WIRED obtained through a public record request, including a legal agreement, statements of work, and internal PowerPoint presentations, describe how the monitoring system operates and provide a glimpse into its inner workings.

The Fulton County Sheriff’s Office and Talitrix claim the system can help make understaffed jails more efficient and increase overall safety, while monitoring heart rates can alert staff to an inmate’s potential health problems or suicide attempts. Critics, meanwhile, say monitoring technologies subject inmates to more surveillance and fail to address deeper issues with the criminal justice system.

The Talitrix system is one of a number of electronic monitoring devices being deployed in the sprawling web of local jails in the United States—and it may be one of the most sophisticated. Some appear to focus on suicide risk, while others have used RFID chips that are manually scanned. As jails and prisons face staffing shortages, they’ve increasingly turned to automation to monitor and control people caught up in the system. At the same time, academic researchers have said inmates are “one of the best surveilled, data-fied and documented populations,” without a choice to opt out.

“Inside the Walls”

Talitrix’s tracking system is made up of two parts: the physical infrastructure—sensors embedded in the jail and Fitbit-like wearables—and its software that allows corrections officers to monitor data being collected and receive alerts.

Talitrix first started working with Fulton County Sheriff’s Office in September 2021, company documents show. The firm initially ran a trial of its system within one of the region’s jails while it was developing the technology, and it has been expanding its use since February of this year. In total, the documents show, 750 sensors (costing $350 each) are to be installed and 1,000 wristbands (at $130 each) provided. The sensors are being placed around the jail but not within cells, those involved say. Use of the software costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

The plan is for around 450 inmates to wear the wristbands as part of a deal at the region’s main Rice Street jail, says Justin Hawkins, CEO of Talitrix. This includes the psychiatric and acute medical wards. (Lt Col Jarrett Gorlin, from the Sheriff’s Office, confirms that the department has been trialing the wristbands and is planning to further roll out the technology, although a “timeline for the full deployment is yet to be determined.”)

The biometric wristbands are not unlike sports watches, but they have been developed specifically for use in jails and prisons. Hawkins says the wristbands, which don’t have screens or GPS, can track people’s heart rate—oxygen tracking is coming to a future version—and communicate with the sensors in the walls. Hawkins says “several different radio frequencies” have been combined with the company’s algorithm to create the system.

Each band has a battery life of 30 days and a locking mechanism that inmates cannot undo, the CEO says. If a band is cut, it will alert prison staff within 15 seconds, he says. The documents say the system can track where inmates are, recording how long they spend in cells or in specific areas of the jail, such as visitation rooms. A statement of work between the company and the Fulton County Sheriff’s Office from January 2023 says the software should include the ability to “maintain spacing between designated inmates” and “create and archive inmate movement.” It also says the devices are not certified as medical products.

Screenshots of a dashboard of Talitrix’s software, which is called Inside the Walls, show correction officers can see how many inmates are within each area of the jail at any time, names of inmates, their jail-cell numbers, and heart rate details—including the last recorded rate and a graph over time. It shows the number of hours an inmate has been in their cell, compared to outside of it. A tab within the software lists alerts that have issued for inmates when their heart rate has dropped or spiked.

One option within the system is a 3D reconstruction of the jail facility, dubbed a “facility replay.” This shows where inmates, represented by generic human characters, are standing at a given time. Screenshots in a Powerpoint slide show inmates standing near each other.

“I think it’s a terrifying leap forward in terms of using technology to manage the jail population,” says James Kilgore, a media fellow at nonprofit MediaJustice, who has written about electronic monitoring and spent six years incarcerated. “It’s just legitimizing gathering all kinds of biometric data on people that really had nothing to do with people being in jail,” says Kilgore, who reviewed the documents at WIRED’s request. “I just fear what can happen if all of a sudden, the Talitrix says that your heartbeat is going 140 beats per minute, when it isn’t,” Kilgore adds. “And what they’re going to do to you, in response to all that data that they used.”

“The heart rate data is used as a predictor of a potential serious health issue,” says Gorlin from Fulton County Sheriff’s Office. “If the individual falls outside of the prescribed levels, then the facility personnel are alerted. Further, the heart rate is not used in any algorithm that would impact personal privacy.” Gorlin says the location and movement of inmates can help “ensure proper count” and could eventually be used for “alerting jail personnel of two individuals coming into proximity with each other where a violent act could be perpetuated.”

Hawkins says the company’s software takes an average heart rate over an entire minute and uses “predictive analytics” to take into account what a person’s heart rate usually looks like. Both the CEO and Sheriff’s Office official say biometric and location data is “view-only” and that correctional officers are not allowed to edit or export information. “Data is not used or released beyond the application in any fashion, and the application does not integrate with any other state, local, federal, or private application for the purpose of data transmission,” a statement says.

Nicol Turner Lee, director at the Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, says the system suggests an “additional layer of surveillance” for those who are incarcerated and that it is crucial this comes with “appropriate privacy protections,” including rules around how collected information can be used. “It’s very important for law enforcement and correctional institutions to ensure the protection of the data being collected so that it’s not straying from its intended purposes,” says Turner Lee, who also reviewed the documents.

“Smart Prisons”

Surveillance and monitoring are intrinsic to prisons and jails around the world. Anne Kaun, a media and communication studies professor at Södertörn University, Sweden, has written a book on technology and prisons and says institutions have been used as testing grounds for surveillance technologies before they are further rolled out. In Sweden during the 1950s, prisons were one of the first places CCTV was used, Kaun says. “There was no discussion about privacy issues at all,” Kaun says. This is being replicated, at least to some extent, Kaun says, with new technological developments.

Recent years have seen an uptick in the use of monitoring technologies within criminal justice systems and immigration enforcement. Hong Kong officials have suggested using facial recognition and robot wardens within prisons to help deal with staff shortages, while GPS ankle monitors and tracking apps are increasingly being used to monitor those who are released. Face recognition smartwatches have been proposed for use in the UK, and Chinese prisons are using “emotion-tracking” technology. Many of the systems have been error-prone, are unproven, or produce inaccurate results for individuals with darker skin tones.

“There’s been this constant iteration of these different monitoring systems,” says Pilar Weiss, the director of the Community Justice Exchange, an NGO that works to end criminalization and incarceration. Weiss says that across the sprawling, largely privatized US prison system, which involves more than 4,000 suppliers providing services, there is little standardization of the systems that are used within jails.

There is likely to be an expansion of monitoring systems across the United States, Turner Less says, because technology can be seen as a quick fix. With the patchwork of state-level privacy laws in place, there is not likely to be the “guidance and guardrails” in place to protect people’s data, Turner Lee adds. “When it comes to those impacted by the criminal justice system and those who are sitting within prisons, there is an implicit assumption that their rights do not matter.”

Hawkins, the Talitrix CEO, says his company is on the verge of signing up more facilities to use its tool and is talking with other state-level correction facilities. He says the ways inmates are treated across the country is not acceptable because there is an over-incarceration rate within the United States, failing infrastructure within prisons, corruption among some officials, and staffing shortages that impact how inmates are treated. “Getting folks out of jail faster, who are not a threat to society, is the best thing that I think the United States could do,” he says.

Ultimately, Kilgore says, putting technology into a system isn’t likely to improve the quality of life within a prison. “We need human solutions,” he says, such as policy changes and programs that address issues with the justice system. “You can’t put this technology into a punitive system and have it be anything but punitive.”

Talitrix Prison-Monitoring System Tracks Inmates Down to Their Heart Rate

Plus: Instagram’s CSAM network gets exposed, Clop hackers claim credit for MOVEit Transfer exploit, and a $35 million crypto heist has North Korean ties.

Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference this week included an array of announcements about operating system releases and, of course, the company's anticipated mixed-reality headset, Vision Pro. Apple also announced that it is expanding on-device nudity detection for children's accounts as part of its efforts to combat the creation and distribution of child sexual abuse material. The company also debuted more flexible nudity detection for adults.

Internal documents obtained by WIRED revealed new details this week about how the imageboard platform 4chan does, and does not, moderate content—resulting in a violent and bigoted morass. Researchers like a group at the University of Texas, Austin, are increasingly developing support resources and clinics that institutions like local governments and small businesses can lean on for critical cybersecurity advice and assistance. Meanwhile, cybercriminals are expanding their use of artificial intelligence tools to generate content for scams, but defenders are also incorporating AI into their detection strategies.

The US Department of Justice on Friday indicted two Russian men, Alexey Bilyuchenko and Aleksandr Verner, for the 650,000-bitcoin hack of Mt. Gox. The two appear to have been charged in absentia while evading arrest in Russia—unlike one of their alleged accomplices, Alexander Vinnik, who was previously convicted in 2020.

Bilyuchenko and Verner are accused of breaching Mt. Gox in 2011, in the earliest days of that original bitcoin exchange's founding. The DOJ says they slowly siphoned out coins from the exchange for three years until Mt. Gox revealed the theft and declared bankruptcy in February 2014. In the meantime, Bilyuchenko and Vinnik allegedly created an entire _other_ exchange, BTC-e, to launder the proceeds of this massive hack. In the years that followed, BTC-e became a giant cash-out point for criminal cryptocurrency of every kind.

The new indictment against Bilyuchenko and Verner offers only a mixed resolution to the case of one of the biggest-ever cybercriminal thefts. By unsealing the new indictment, the DOJ may be tacitly acknowledging that it won't ever have a chance to lay hands on the two men. The indictment against Vinnik, by contrast, was kept sealed for years until he made the mistake of going on vacation to Greece in 2017. After years in prison in France, Vinnik has now been extradited to face charges in the US, where he's lobbying to be swapped for imprisoned _Wall Street Journal_ reporter Evan Gershkovich.

Critics of end-to-end encryption tools and anonymous networks like the dark web often point to the creation and sharing of child sexual abuse material, or CSAM, as the worst consequence of those tools' privacy. But a new study from _The Wall Street Journal_, the Stanford Internet Observatory, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst found a vast network of child exploitation images and videos being sold and even commissioned on Instagram's open, public network. And in some cases, its automated recommendation algorithms even promoted more CSAM materials to users who sought that horrific content.

The researchers discovered that certain hashtags on Instagram such as #pedobait and #mnsfw (or "minor not-safe-for-work") led users to hidden—but fully public—groups of hundreds of accounts where CSAM was freely advertised, and where users could commission images and videos of sexual acts and self-harm. In some cases, the accounts even offered to sell in-person sexual encounters with children. And when users sought those vile materials, Instagram's algorithms actively promoted more to them, the researchers found, even as it also posted interstitial warnings to the users that the content was illegal and causes “extreme harm” to children. In response to the study, Instagram has changed those interstitials to block CSAM content rather than merely warn users about its consequences, and Instagram's parent company, Meta, says it's created a new task force to address the problem.

The researchers found that Twitter, too, hosted 128 accounts selling CSAM materials. But that number was less than a third of the 408 accounts selling CSAM on Instagram's much larger network.

The notorious Russia-linked ransomware gang known as Clop took responsibility on Monday for stealing data from what it claims amounts to “hundreds of companies” through a vulnerability in the file-transfer service MOVEit Transfer. Microsoft first attributed the activity to the group on Sunday. Clop is known for exploiting vulnerabilities in popular enterprise web services or equipment to steal data and launch extortion campaigns against a number of organizations at once. The group began attacking the MOVEit Transfer vulnerability at the end of May. 

Another week, another massive crypto heist linked to the Hermit Kingdom's hackers. Last weekend, the independent blockchain analysis sleuth who goes by the name ZachXBT on Twitter posted evidence of $35 million being siphoned out of the addresses of the cryptocurrency firm Atomic Wallet. He found that just five users of the hosted cryptocurrency wallet service had lost $17 million, and one had lost $8 million. “Unfortunately, with the occurrence of this terrifying hack, my life has been disrupted,” one Turkish user who lost their life savings told _Fortune_. Cryptocurrency tracing firm Elliptic quickly found blockchain evidence tying the hack to North Korean state-sponsored hackers. The funds had flowed into Sinbad.io, a cryptocurrency “mixing” service that has quickly become the Kim regime's preferred crypto laundering tool. If the Atomic Wallet was indeed carried out by North Korea—as all signs indicate—it would be the biggest crypto theft the country's hackers have pulled off since the $100 million pillaging of Horizon Bridge a year ago.

9 Years After the Mt. Gox Hack, Feds Indict Alleged Culprits

New testimony from defectors reveals pervasive surveillance and monitoring of limited internet connections. For millions of others, the internet simply doesn't exist.

For 25 million North Koreans, the internet is an impossibility. Only a few thousand privileged members of the hermit kingdom’s society can access the global internet, while even the country’s heavily censored internal intranet is out of reach for the majority of the population. Getting access to free and open information isn’t an option.

New research from South Korea-based human rights organization People for Successful Corean Reunification (Pscore) details the reality for those who—in very limited circumstances—manage to get online in North Korea. The report reveals a days-long approval process to gain internet access, after which monitors sit next to people while they browse and approve their activities every five minutes. Even then, what can be accessed reveals little about the world outside North Korea’s borders.

Documentation from the NGO is being presented today at the human rights conference RightsCon and sheds light on the regime with the most limited internet freedoms, which fall far below the restrictive and surveilled internet access in China and Iran. For millions of people in North Korea, the internet simply doesn’t exist.

“I was taught about the World Wide Web, and even had to memorize it for an exam, but I only knew about the internet in theory,” one North Korean defector who left the country told Pscore researchers. “I knew it was a sort of network where you can search but didn’t actually know what it was.” Another said they didn’t “know the concept of Wi-Fi,” let alone have any clue about Google.

Getting an accurate picture of what happens within Kim Jong Un’s sealed-off state is incredibly challenging. Officials control all information flows and present state propaganda to the world. Analysts turn to those who escape and defect, at great personal risk, for a glimpse of North Korean reality. Pscore’s internet freedom report is based on 24 face-to-face interviews with defectors and a survey of 158 others. All left North Korea between 2012 and 2022.

The report says North Korean researcher Kim Suk-Han—all defector names within the research are pseudonyms for safety reasons—used the internet five times when they were living in the country. They had used the internet while on a trip to China and so had high expectations, they told the researchers. Instead, they faced limited access and constant surveillance.

“A librarian sits between two internet users and continuously monitors what people on both sides are searching up,” Kim said in testimony to the researchers. “Every five minutes, the screen freezes automatically, and the librarian must do a fingerprint authentication to allow further internet use.” A state security officer was also always nearby, they said.

People were allowed to use the internet for an hour, and if someone wanted more time, they would need to obtain new permission, Kim said. It took around two days to get permission from authorities to use the internet, a task requiring approvals from various officials. If someone applied too often, they would be made to wait, Kim said. “Every Korean website is blocked, and only Chinese or English websites are available.”

Over the past decade, there has been an increased number of digital devices in North Korea. Around 50 to 80 percent of adults may now have mobile phones, allowing them to text and call family members. Yet the use of these phones is highly controlled—data speeds are low, with devices capturing screenshots every few minutes and code that only allows government-approved content to be shown. And internet penetration is at nowhere near the same level.

“North Korean people cannot use it, not because of the infrastructure or not because of the country’s poor conditions,” says Nam Bada, the secretary general of Pscore and editor of the report. “It is only because of the governmental policy.”

A few dozen families with connections to Kim Jong-Un and some foreigners have unrestricted access to the global internet, while a “few thousand” people—including government officials, researchers, and students studying IT—can access a surveillance-heavy version of it, according to the report and previous research. North Koreans like Kim who are allowed some foreign travel, usually for business, can sometimes access the global web while abroad.

Mitch Haszard, a senior threat intelligence analyst at security firm Recorded Future, which has previously analyzed North Korean internet traffic, says Chinese and Russian internet service providers hook the country up to the global network, and access by foreign visitors makes up some of what can be seen externally. This may have changed during the Covid-19 pandemic when there were fewer foreigners in North Korea and its borders were closed.

According to multiple defectors quoted in the Pscore report, global internet access is only available in certain locations and buildings within North Korea. One person claimed internet connections at the National Academy of Sciences in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital, were only available on the second floor, and just eight computers were connected. Around five people were granted use, they said.

Another defector told the Pscore researchers that when they got permission to travel to Pyongyang to use the internet, they tried to download medical research papers but could only access the titles of the papers and the author names. “I knew the concept of the global internet when I was in North Korea, but I didn’t know that so much information was exchanged through it,” said Shin Yong-Rok, another defector.

Martyn Williams is a senior fellow with the Stimson Center and 38 North project who has extensively studied technology in North Korea but was not involved with the report. Williams says the testimonies track with those of other defectors but add new details about the levels of surveillance people face. In general, Williams says, internet access “appears to be available for officially sanctioned uses, such as some universities, research establishments, and likely some trade organizations and other establishments.” University students Williams spoke to have previously said that they are required to state why they need to use the internet and are monitored when they get online.

Williams points to a 2020 North Korean law that has ramped up the country’s efforts to stop foreign information from being accessed in the country. In recent years, outside information—including TV shows and South Korean content—has been smuggled across the border using USB drives, giving people a glimpse of the outside world. “The new law levies harsh penalties, up to and including death, on people caught with foreign information,” Williams says. (In 2021 it was reported that a man who smuggled copies of the dystopian Netflix thriller _Squid Game_ into North Korea and sold them was sentenced to death.)

While tightly controlled access to the internet is available for a few thousand “elites,” the local intranet is marginally more accessible—in theory, at least. Known as Kwangmyong, the intranet offers only a handful of websites. “Citizens can access \[the intranet\] from their phones or from computers,” Williams says. “Over the years, we’ve seen lots of websites shown and offered, and it appears that many major sectors of the government have their own sites with official information.” Some online shopping has recently become available, according to reports.

Defectors told Pscore that intranet prices were generally too high for most people, meaning a lot of access happens at official buildings, such as universities and libraries, where surveillance levels are high. People willing to take the risk can try to get around the system. “I’ve secretly played the game \[_Dota_\] twice through the intranet with people in another region,” said one defector, given the pseudonym Jung Woo-Jin. “I’ve only played three times. If you play more, your IP will be exposed by using more than a certain time, then your place will be recorded.” Most people included in the study said intranet use is impractical.

Pscore’s report lists around two dozen recommendations, addressed to both North Korea and international countries, for improving internet freedom. The report pushes for more connectivity within the country, advising North Korea to stop monitoring people and to connect the intranet to the global internet. If a full internet connection cannot be provided, a censored model like China’s would be a better last resort, the report says.

The report adds that countries should work to create a “legal framework” for international access and recognize internet access as a law-backed human right. Nam, the Pscore secretary general, says increasing internet access could benefit health care and education and improve people’s human rights, such as freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly.

Globally, 5.3 billion people regularly use the internet, or around 66 percent of Earth’s population. For years, official bodies have declared internet access to be a human right—with the United Nations saying there should be full connectivity by 2030. “The real problem is how to translate these commitments into reality,” says Barbora Bukovská, senior director of law and policy at human rights organization Article 19. “This includes issues such as making the internet affordable, getting people online, acquiring minimum digital skills and literacy, or achieving equality in access for marginalized groups and those at risk of discrimination.”

Bukovská says North Korea’s human rights record indicates that mandating internet access at a global level would likely not make much difference—bigger change within the country would be needed to implement such changes. But for those who have managed to leave the country, the difference is stark. “People will long for any new information, such as science and technology information,” defector Kim Suk-Han told researchers, “which are accessible through the internet.”

The Bizarre Reality of Getting Online in North Korea

UT-Austin will join a growing movement to launch cybersecurity clinics for cities and small businesses that often fall through the cracks.

The idea for the UT-Austin project emerged from discussions in CISA’s Cybersecurity Advisory Committee, a group of experts from the private sector, academia, civil society, and local government. During conversations about a university running a municipal cyber helpline, Austin quickly emerged as the ideal candidate, thanks to its already popular 311 service and the support of two committee members: Steve Adler, who was then Austin’s mayor, and Chesney, an influential UT faculty member.

CISA director Jen Easterly has championed the project and recently told the advisory committee that her agency will consider launching a nationwide cyber 311 system after evaluating Austin’s new clinic and similar efforts.

“The UT-Austin pilot is helping us better understand how we can provide cybersecurity services for small and medium-size businesses across our nation,” Easterly says in a statement, adding that she is “truly excited” about it.

Building a Clinic

UT-Austin’s clinic will take the form of a two-semester course. In the fall, Francesca Lockhart, a former top Texas homeland security official Chesney recruited to lead the project, will teach students cybersecurity skills and partner them with local organizations and businesses, giving students time to learn how those organizations operate and what they need. In the spring, teams of students will then create and implement cybersecurity improvement plans for their clients.

Lockhart’s curriculum will cover lessons like inventorying the devices on a network, scanning for and fixing known vulnerabilities, configuring a firewall, conducting penetration testing, and understanding the Linux operating system and the Python programming language, which are widely used in diagnosing and fixing security issues. 

The 20 people in the inaugural class include students majoring in business and computer science, but also those studying biochemistry and international relations. Lockhart is still evaluating a variety of potential clients, including small businesses; nonprofits serving vulnerable populations in Austin; neighboring school districts and city governments; and startups focused on fighting hunger, disease, and other social ills.

Lockhart says the clinic represents “a great opportunity to get students real-world career experience and fill the cybersecurity workforce gap while also serving the needs of some of these under-resourced organizations.”

Any expansion to a 311-type service is far off. “You need to walk before you run,” Chesney says.

Expanding the Scope

To Steve Adler, Austin’s former mayor, a cyber helpline would be a natural extension of the UT-Austin project.

Austin’s 311 service already gets calls from people worried about phishing scams and other low-level cyberattacks. The next step would be to create a referral system so 311 operators could turn certain calls over to UT-Austin students trained to handle a wide range of common incidents. “It might expand the scope of what people think would be covered by a 311 call,” says Adler, who served as mayor from 2015 to 2023.

Another state is already forging ahead with this idea. Later this year, Bridgewater State University in Massachusetts will launch a security operations center (SOC) to answer emergency calls from the community. The 24/7 SOC, created in partnership with a state-funded consortium, will be staffed by professional cyber experts, but students will be able to observe and participate in their work.

The Bold Plan to Create Cyber 311 Hotlines

Instead of scanning iCloud for illegal content, Apple's tech will locally flag inappropriate images for kids. And adults are getting an opt-in nudes filter, too.

In December, Apple announced that it was killing a controversial iCloud photo-scanning tool the company had devised to combat child sexual abuse material (CSAM) in what it said was a privacy-preserving way. Apple then said that its anti-CSAM efforts would instead center around its “Communication Safety” features for children, initially announced in August 2021. And at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino today, Apple debuted expansions to the mechanism, including an additional feature tailored to adults.

Communication Safety scans messages locally on young users' devices to flag content that children are receiving or sending in messages on iOS that contain nudity. Apple announced today that the feature is also expanding to FaceTime video messages, Contact Posters in the Phone app, the Photos picker tool where users choose photos or videos to send, and AirDrop. The feature's on-device processing means that Apple never sees the content being flagged, but beginning this fall, Communication Safety will be turned on by default for all child accounts—kids under 13—in a Family Sharing plan. Parents can elect to disable to feature if they choose.

“The Communication Safety feature is one where we really want to give the child a moment to pause and hopefully get disrupted out what might be a grooming conversation,” says Apple's head of user privacy Erik Neuenschwander. “So it’s meant to be high friction. It’s meant to be that there is an answer which we think is likely right in that child’s situation, which is not to move forward, and we really want to make sure they’re educated.”

Apple said in December that it planned to make an application programming interface (API) available so third-party developers could easily integrate Communication Safety into their apps and use it to detect child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. The API, known as the Sensitive Content Analysis framework, is available now for developers. Platforms like Discord have already said that they plan to incorporate it into their iOS apps.

A Communication Safety prompt for a child's account.

Photograph: Apple

One criticism of anti-CSAM initiatives like Communication Safety is that they don't have full coverage across apps and services to flag content and protect children everywhere, potentially allowing communications with abusers to slip through. And this is precisely why Apple says it invested heavily to develop a robust API that app makers can easily incorporate into their software.

“There was a lot of work that we had to do to create this model,” Neuenschwander says. “We can make that investment once and then have that be leveraged across the platform for potentially all of the applications our users use.”

An opt-in Sensitive Content Warning for an adult's account.

Photograph: Apple

On top of Communication Safety, Apple says that it has also received feedback about interest in a version of the feature for adults. So today, the company also launched “Sensitive Content Warning,” which similarly uses local scanning to flag and blur images and videos that contain nudity. The feature is optional and controlled in the iOS “Privacy & Security” settings menu. And it's designed to be more subtle than Communication Safety. The goal is to protect adult users from content they don't want to see without being intrusive or unhelpful.

Meaningfully addressing and reducing child sexual abuse online is a complicated and difficult problem. And Apple says that it isn't done exploring and investing in new solutions. But with such high stakes, there's a real urgency for a company like Apple to roll out features that will have an impact and promote their adoption as widely as possible.

Source

Wired