Meta Platforms-owned WhatsApp scored a major legal victory in its fight against Israeli commercial spyware vendor NSO Group after a federal judge in the U.S. state of California ruled in favor of the messaging giant for exploiting a security vulnerability to deliver Pegasus.
"The limited evidentiary record before the court does show that defendants' Pegasus code was sent through plaintiffs'

U.S. Judge Rules Against NSO Group in WhatsApp Pegasus Spyware Case

The Nemesis and ShinyHunters attackers scanned millions of IP addresses to find exploitable cloud-based flaws, though their operation ironically was discovered due to a cloud misconfiguration of their own doing.

Source: GK Images via Alamy Stock Photo

Cybercriminal gangs have exploited vulnerabilities in public websites to steal Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud credentials and other data from thousands of organizations, in a mass cyber operation that involved scanning millions of sites for vulnerable endpoints.

Independent cybersecurity researchers Noam Rotem and Ran Locar of the loosely organized research group CyberCyber Labs uncovered the operation in August, and reported it to vpnMentor, which published a blog post on Dec. 9 about their findings. Attackers appear to be connected to known threat groups Nemesis and ShinyHunters, the latter of which is probably best known for a cloud breach earlier this year that stole data from half a million Ticketmaster customers.

“Both of these 'gangs' represent a technically sophisticated cybercriminal syndicate that operates at scale for profit and uses their technical skills to identify weaknesses in controls from enterprises migrating to cloud computing without fully understanding the complexity of services nor the controls offered in cloud computing," notes Jim Routh, chief trust officer at Saviynt, a cloud identity and security management firm.

Ironically, however, the researchers discovered the operation when the French-speaking attackers committed a cloud-based faux pas of their own — they stored some of the data harvested from the victims in an AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket that contained 2TB of data and was left open due to a misconfiguration by its owner, according to the post.

Related:Attackers Can Use QR Codes to Bypass Browser Isolation

"The S3 bucket was being used as a 'shared drive' between the attack group members, based on the source code of the tools used by them," the vpnMentor research team wrote in the post.

Among the data stolen in the operation included infrastructure credentials, proprietary source code, application databases, and even credentials to additional external services. The bucket also included the code and software tools used to run the operation, as well thousands of keys and secrets lifted from victim networks, the researchers said.

**Two-Part Attack Sequence**

The researchers ultimately reconstructed a two-step attack sequence of discovery and exploitation. Attackers began with a series of scripts to scan vast ranges of IPs belonging to AWS, looking for "known application vulnerabilities as well as blatant mistakes," according to the vpnMentor team.

Attackers employed the IT search engine Shodan to perform a reverse lookup on the IP addresses, using a utility in their arsenal to get the domain names associated with each IP address that exists within the AWS ranges to expand their attack surface. In an effort to further extend the domains list, they also analyzed the SSL certificate served by each IP to extract the domain names associated with it.

Related:Wyden and Schmitt Call for Investigation of Pentagon's Phone Systems

After determining the targets, they began a scanning process, first to find exposed generic endpoints and then to categorize the system, such as Laravel, WordPress, etc. Once this was done, they would perform further tests, attempting to extract database access information, AWS customer keys and secrets, passwords, database credentials, Google and Facebook account credentials, crypto public and private keys (for CoinPayment, Binance, and BitcoinD), and more from product-specific endpoints.

"Each set of credentials was tested and verified in order to determine if it was active or not," according to the post. "They were also written to output files to be exploited at a later stage of the operation."

When exposed AWS customer credentials were found and verified, the attackers also tried to check for privileges on key AWS services, including: identity and access management (IAM), Simple Email Service (SES), Simple Notification Service (SNS), and S3.

**Cyberattacker Attribution & AWS Response**

Related:Pegasus Spyware Infections Proliferate Across iOS, Android Devices

The researchers tracked the perpetrators via tools used in the operation, which "appear to be the same" as those used by ShinyHunters. The tools are documented in French and signed by "Sezyo Kaizen," an alias associated with Sebastien Raoult, a ShinyHunters member who was arrested and pleaded guilty to criminal charges earlier this year.

The researchers also recovered a signature used by the operator of a Dark Web market called "Nemesis Blackmarket," which focuses on selling stolen access credentials and accounts used for spam.

The researchers, who work out of Israel, reported their findings to the Israeli Cyber Directorate in early September, and then notified AWS Security in a report sent on Sept. 26. The company immediately took steps to mitigate the impact and alert affected customers of the risk, according to vpnMentor.

Ultimately, the AWS team found that the operation targeted flaws present on the customer application side of the shared responsibility cloud model and did not reflect any fault of AWS, which the researchers said they "fully agree with." The AWS security team confirmed they completed their investigation and mitigation on Nov. 9 and gave the researchers the green light to disclose the incident.

**How to Secure the Cloud IT Footprint**

Some steps organizations can take to avoid a similar attack against their respective cloud environments include making sure hardcoded credentials are never present in their code or even in their filesystem, where they might be accessed by unauthorized parties.

Organizations also should conduct simple Web scans using open source tools like "dirsearch" or  "nikto," which are often used by lazy attackers to identify common vulnerabilities. This will allow them to find holes in their environment before a malicious actor does, the researchers noted.

A Web application firewall (WAF) also is a relatively low-cost solution to block malicious activity, and it's also worthwhile to "roll" keys, passwords, and other secrets periodically, they said. Organizations also can create CanaryTokens in their code in secret places, the researchers noted, which act as tripwires to alert administrators that an attacker may be poking around where they shouldn't be.

Routh says the incident also provides a learning opportunity for organizations which, when presented with new technology options, should adjust and design cyber controls to achieve resilience rather than go with conventional control methods.

**About the Author**

Elizabeth Montalbano is a freelance writer, journalist, and therapeutic writing mentor with more than 25 years of professional experience. Her areas of expertise include technology, business, and culture. Elizabeth previously lived and worked as a full-time journalist in Phoenix, San Francisco, and New York City; she currently resides in a village on the southwest coast of Portugal. In her free time, she enjoys surfing, hiking with her dogs, traveling, playing music, yoga, and cooking.

Cybercrime Gangs Abscond With Thousands of AWS Credentials

Researchers demonstrate a proof-of-concept cyberattack vector that gets around remote, on-premises, and local versions of browser isolation security technology to send malicious communications from an attacker-controlled server.

Source: Sasin Paraska via Shutterstock

Security researchers have found a way to bypass three types of browser isolation, which would allow a cyberattacker to send malicious data to a remote device by using QR codes.

Researchers from Mandiant demonstrated a proof-of-concept (PoC) that gets around remote, on-premises, and local browser isolation by overriding HTTP request-based communication with machine-readable QR codes. In this way, the technique allows attackers to send commands from a command-and-control (C2) server to a victim's device.

Browser isolation is often used by organizations to fight phishing threats, protect a device from browser-delivered attacks, and deter typical C2 tactics used by attackers. The technique runs a browser in a secure environment — such as a cloud server or virtual machine — and then streams the visual content to the user's device.

When browser isolation is being used, the remote browser handles everything from page rendering to executing JavaScript, with only the visual appearance of the webpage sent back to the user's local browser.

As attackers generally send commands to and from a victim's device through HTTP requests, browser isolation makes it challenging for attackers to remotely control a device in the typical way. That's because the HTTP response returned to the local browser contains only the streaming engine to render the remote browser's visual page contents, "and only a stream of pixels is sent to the local browser to visually render the webpage," Mandiant principal security consultant Thibault Van Geluwe de Berlaere wrote in the post. "This prevents typical HTTP-based C2 because the local device cannot decode the HTTP response."

Related:Cybercrime Gangs Abscond With Thousands of AWS Credentials

**Bypassing Browser Isolation With QR Codes**

Mandiant researchers developed a PoC that demonstrates how to get around browser isolation using the Puppeteer JavaScript library and the Google Chrome browser in headless mode. However, any modern browser can be used to achieve the PoC, Van Geluwe de Berlaere noted.

Instead of returning the C2 data in the HTTP request headers or body, as a typical attacker-controlled attempt to send commands to a device might, the C2 server returns a valid webpage that visually shows a QR code. "The implant then uses a local headless browser … to render the page, grabs a screenshot, and reads the QR code to retrieve the embedded data," Van Geluwe de Berlaere wrote.

"By taking advantage of machine-readable QR codes, an attacker can send data from the attacker-controlled server to a malicious implant even when the webpage is rendered in a remote browser."

Related:Wyden and Schmitt Call for Investigation of Pentagon's Phone Systems

In the attack sequence, the malicious implant visually renders the webpage from the browser isolation's pixel streaming engine and decodes the command from the QR code displayed on the page. It then retrieves a valid HTML webpage from the C2 server with the command data encoded in a QR code visually shown on the page.

The remote browser then returns the pixel-streaming engine back to the local browser, starting a visual stream that shows the rendered page obtained from the C2 server. The implant waits for the page to fully render, then grabs a screenshot of the local browser that contains the QR code, which the malicious implant reads to execute the C2 command on the compromised device.

The implant then goes through the local browser again to navigate to a new URL that includes the command output encoded in a URL parameter. This parameter is passed through to the remote browser and ultimately to the C2 server, which decodes the command output as in traditional HTTP-based C2.

**Challenges to Implementing the Bypass**

Though the PoC demonstrates how attackers can get around browser isolation, there are some limitations and challenges to consider when using it, the researchers noted.

One is that it's not feasible to use the PoC with QR codes that have the maximum data size — i.e., 2,953 bytes, 177x177 grid, Error Correction Level "L" — as "the visual stream of the webpage rendered in the local browser was of insufficient quality to reliably read the QR code contents," Van Geluwe de Berlaere explained. Instead, the researchers used QR codes containing a maximum of 2,189 bytes of content.

Related:Pegasus Spyware Infections Proliferate Across iOS, Android Devices

Moreover, the requests take at least five seconds to reliably show and scan the QR code due to the processing involved when using Chrome in headless mode, as well as the time it takes for the remote browser to start up, page-rendering requirements, and the stream of visual content from the remote browser back to the local browser. "This introduces significant latency in the C2 channel," he wrote.

Finally, the PoC does not consider other security features of browser isolation, such as domain reputation, URL scanning, data-loss prevention, and request heuristics, which may need to be overcome if they are present in the browser-isolation environment on which it is being used.

Despite the success of the bypass, Mandiant still recommends browser isolation as a strong protection measure against client-side browser exploitation and phishing attacks. However, Van Geluwe de Berlaere wrote, it should be used as one part of "a well-rounded cyber defense posture" that also includes monitoring for anomalous network traffic and browser in automation mode to defend against Web-based attacks.

**About the Author**

Elizabeth Montalbano is a freelance writer, journalist, and therapeutic writing mentor with more than 25 years of professional experience. Her areas of expertise include technology, business, and culture. Elizabeth previously lived and worked as a full-time journalist in Phoenix, San Francisco, and New York City; she currently resides in a village on the southwest coast of Portugal. In her free time, she enjoys surfing, hiking with her dogs, traveling, playing music, yoga, and cooking.

Attackers Can Use QR Codes to Bypass Browser Isolation

Plus: Russian spies keep hijacking other hackers’ infrastructure, Hydra dark web market admin gets life sentence in Russia, and more of the week’s top security news.

A consortium of global law enforcement agencies led by Britain’s National Crime Agency announced a takedown operation this week against two major Russian money-laundering networks that process billions of dollars each year in more than 30 locations around the world. WIRED had exclusive access to the investigation, which uncovered new and troubling laundering techniques, particularly schemes to directly change cryptocurrency for cash. As the United States government scrambles to address China’s “Salt Typhoon” digital espionage campaign into US telecoms, two senators demanded this week that the Department of Defense investigate its failure to secure its own communications and address known vulnerabilities in US telecom infrastructure. Meanwhile, Signal Foundation president Meredith Whittaker spoke at WIRED’s The Big Interview event in San Francisco this week about Signal’s enduring commitment to bring private, end-to-end encrypted communication services to people all over the world regardless of geopolitical climate.

A new smartphone scanner from the mobile device security firm iVerify can quickly and easily detect spyware and has already flagged seven devices infected with the invasive Pegasus surveillance tool. Programmer Micah Lee built a tool to help you save and delete your X posts after he offended Elon Musk and was banned from the platform. And privacy advocate Nighat Dad is fighting to protect women from digital harassment in Pakistan after escaping from an abusive marriage.

The US Federal Trade Commission is targeting data brokers who it says unlawfully tracked protesters and US military personnel, but the enforcement efforts seem likely to trail off under the Trump administration. Similarly, the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has devised a strategy to impose new oversight on predatory data brokers, but the new administration may not continue the initiative. Some new laws are finally coming around the world in 2025 that will attempt to regulate the dysfunction of the digital advertising industry, but malicious advertising is still booming around the world and continues to play a big role in global scamming.

And there’s more. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn’t cover in-depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

**US Officials Urge Americans to Encrypt Calls and Texts After Chinese Telecom Hacking**

Remember how the US federal government spent much of the last three decades periodically decrying the dangers of strong, freely available encryption tools, arguing that because they enable criminals and terrorists, they should be outlawed or required to implement government-approved backdoors? As of this week, the government will never again be able to make that argument without privacy advocates pointing to a particular phone call where two officials recommended Americans use exactly those encryption tools to protect themselves amidst an ongoing massive breach of US telecoms by Chinese hackers.

In a briefing with reporters about the breach of no fewer than eight phone companies by the Chinese state-sponsored espionage hackers known as Salt Typhoon, officials from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the FBI both said that amid the still-uncontrolled infiltration of US telecoms that have exposed calls and texts, Americans should use encryption apps to safeguard their privacy. “Encryption is your friend, whether it’s on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication,” said Jeff Greene, CISA’s executive assistant director for cybersecurity. (Signal and WhatsApp, for instance, end-to-end encrypt calls and texts, though the officials didn’t name any particular apps.)

The recommendation amid what one senator has called “the worst telecom hack in our nation’s history” represents a stunning reversal from previous US officials’ rhetoric on encryption, and in particular the FBI’s repeated calls for access to backdoors in encryption. In fact, it was exactly this sort of government-approved wiretap capability requirement for US telecoms that the Salt Typhoon hackers in some cases exploited to access Americans communications.

**Russia’s FSB Hackers Keep Hijacking Other Hackers’ Infrastructure for Spying**

The hacker group known as Secret Blizzard, Snake, or Turla, widely believed to work for Russia’s FSB intelligence agency, is known for using some of the most ingenious hacking techniques ever seen to spy on its victims. One of the tricks that’s now become its signature move: hacking the infrastructure of other hackers to stealthily piggyback on their access. This week Microsoft’s threat intelligence researchers and security firm Lumen Technologies revealed that Turla gained access to the servers of a Pakistan-based hacker group and used its visibility into victim networks to spy on government, military and intelligence targets in India and Afghanistan of interest to the Kremlin. In some cases, Turla hijacked the Pakistani hackers’ access to install their own malware, while in other instances they appear to have used the other group’s tools for even greater stealth and deniability. The incident marks the fourth known time since 2017, when it penetrated an Iranian hacker group’s command-and-control servers, that Turla has freeloaded on another hacker group’s infrastructure and tooling, according to Lumen.

**Admin of Russian Dark Web Market Hydra Sentenced to Life in Prison**

The Russian government is known for turning a blind eye to cybercrime—until it doesn’t. This week 15 convicted members of the notorious dark web market Hydra learned the limits of that forbearance when they reportedly received prison sentences ranging from 8 years to 23 years, as well an unprecedented life sentence for the site’s creator Stanislav Moiseyev. Before it was taken down two years ago in a law enforcement operation led by IRS criminal investigators in the US and Germany’s BKA police agency, Hydra was a uniquely sprawling dark web marketplace, one that not only served as the post-Soviet world’s biggest online bazaar for narcotics but also a vast money laundering machine for crimes including ransomware, scams, and sanctions evasion. In total, Hydra enabled more than $5 billion dollars in dirty cryptocurrency transactions since 2015, according to crypto tracing firm Elliptic.

**Suspected Ransomware Actor “Wazawaka” Reportedly Charged and Apprehended by Russia**

Russian law enforcement charged and arrested a software developer last week who is suspected of prolific contributions to multiple ransomware groups, including building malware to extort money from businesses and other targets. The suspect is reportedly Mikhail Matveev, or “Wazawaka,” who has worked as an affiliate with ransomware gangs like Conti, LockBit, Babuk, DarkSide, and Hive. Social media reports indicate that Matveev confirmed his indictment and said that he has been released from law enforcement custody on bail.

Russia’s prosecutor general did not name Matveev, but described charges last week against a 32-year-old hacker under Article 273 of Russia’s Criminal Code, which bans the creation or use of malware. The move came as Russia seemed to be sending some sort of message about its tolerance for cybercrime with the sentencing of the dark web marketplace Hydra’s staff, including a life sentence for its administrator. In 2023, the US government indicted and sanctioned Matveev.

**FBI Is Investigating Exxon Lobbyist Firm Over Hack-and-Leak Operation Targeting Activists**

In a disturbing scoop (one we didn’t cover last week due to the Thanksgiving holiday), Reuters reporters have revealed that the FBI is now investigating a lobbying consultancy hired by Exxon over the firm’s role in a hack-and-leak operation that targeted climate change activists. DCI Group, a lobbying firm hired at the time by Exxon, allegedly gave a list of target activists to a private investigator who then outsourced a hacking operation against those targets to mercenary hackers. After the private investigator—an Israeli man named Amit Forlit, who was later arrested in London and faces US hacking charges—allegedly gave the hacked material to DCI, it leaked the activists’ internal communications about climate change litigation against Exxon to the media, Reuters discovered. The FBI, according to Reuters, has determined that DCI also first previewed that material to Exxon before leaking it. “Those documents were directly employed by Exxon to come after me with all guns blazing,” one attorney working with the activist group, the Center for Climate Integrity, told Reuters. “It turned my life upside down.”

Exxon has denied knowing about any hacking activities and DCI told Reuters in a statement that “we direct all our employees and consultants to comply with the law.”

US Officials Recommend Encryption Apps Amid Chinese Telecom Hacking

The notorious spyware from Israel's NSO Group has been found targeting journalists, government officials, and corporate executives in multiple variants discovered in a threat scan of 3,500 mobile phones.

Source: Coredesign via Shutterstock

Researchers have discovered seven new Pegasus spyware infections targeting journalists, government officials, and corporate executives that started several years ago and span both iPhone and Android devices, demonstrating that the range of the notorious spyware may be even greater than once thought.

Researchers from iVerify discovered multiple devices compromised by Israeli company NSO Group's spyware via attacks initiated between 2021 and 2023 that affect Apple iPhone iOS versions 14, 15, and 16.6, as well as Android, they revealed in a blog post published on Dec. 4. The infections were discovered in May during a threat-hunting scan of 3,500 devices from iVerify users who opted in to the checks.

Specifically, the investigation uncovered multiple Pegasus variants in five unique malware types across iOS and Android. The researchers detected forensic artifacts in diagnostic data, shutdown logs, and crash logs found on the devices.

"Our investigation detected 2.5 infected devices per 1,000 scans — a rate significantly higher than any previously published reports," Matthias Frielingsdorf, Verify co-founder and iOS security researcher, wrote in the post. Each of the infections "represented a device that could have been silently monitored, its data compromised without the owner's knowledge," he wrote.

Related:Wyden and Schmitt Call for Investigation of Pentagon's Phone Systems

"The discovery supported our thesis about the prevalence of spyware on mobile devices — it was hiding in plain sight, undetected by traditional endpoint security measures."

**Pegasus Spyware Reach Underestimated?**

The findings also demonstrate that security researchers, in general, may have underestimated the reach of mobile spyware, particularly Pegasus, Rocky Cole, co-founder and COO of iVerify, tells Dark Reading.

Pegasus, developed by NSO Group — an adversary that iVerify tracks as "Rainbow Ronin" — is a particularly nasty piece of spyware that allows the controller to exploit OS vulnerabilities and leverage zero-click attacks to access and extract whatever they want from an exploited mobile device. Attackers can intercept and transmit messages, emails, media files, passwords, and detailed location information without a user's knowledge or interaction.

Pegasus gained initial notoriety in 2021 when security researchers found that it was being used by state-sponsored actors in illegal surveillance against journalists, politicians, human rights advocates, and other persons of interest to government intelligence agencies. Since then, numerous other infections have surfaced that show how governments have wielded the spyware, with journalists in particular in the crosshairs.

Related:Name That Edge Toon: Shackled!

Now iVerify's discovery suggests that state-sponsored actors not only are using mobile spyware in a narrow way to surveil the most high-profile of targets, but also could be spying on people within typically targeted populations who wouldn’t seem likely to be on their radar, Cole says.

"Previously considered a rare and highly targeted threat, Pegasus was found to be more prevalent and capable of infecting a wider range of devices, not just those belonging to high-risk users," he says.

Moreover, as iVerify’s investigation uncovered multiple Pegasus infections across several iOS versions, some dating back years, it's clear that traditional security measures often fail to detect such threats. This suggests that mobile device users themselves must be included in the detection of malware so they have "the power to understand and defend against threats that were previously invisible," Frielingsdorf wrote.

**Hunt Your Own Device Threats**

Cole says that best practices for preventing spyware infections before they occur include regularly updating devices to the latest OS as soon as possible, as spyware often exploits unpatched vulnerabilities. And though EDR may not pick up every infection, it can be a useful tool for organizations to use alongside more proactive device-specific threat-hunting to "help detect and respond to threats in real time," he says.

Related:Microsoft Boosts Device Security With Windows Resiliency Initiative

Organizations also should educate employees, Cole adds, especially those in high-risk roles, about the risks and best practices for mobile security as an essential protection against spyware infections.

**About the Author**

Elizabeth Montalbano is a freelance writer, journalist, and therapeutic writing mentor with more than 25 years of professional experience. Her areas of expertise include technology, business, and culture. Elizabeth previously lived and worked as a full-time journalist in Phoenix, San Francisco, and New York City; she currently resides in a village on the southwest coast of Portugal. In her free time, she enjoys surfing, hiking with her dogs, traveling, playing music, yoga, and cooking.

Pegasus Spyware Infections Proliferate Across iOS, Android Devices

The mobile device security firm iVerify has been offering a tool since May that makes spyware scanning accessible to anyone—and it’s already turning up victims.

In recent years, commercial spyware has been deployed by more actors against a wider range of victims, but the prevailing narrative has still been that the malware is used in targeted attacks against an extremely small number of people. At the same time, though, it has been difficult to check devices for infection, leading individuals to navigate an ad hoc array of academic institutions and NGOs that have been on the front lines of developing forensic techniques to detect mobile spyware. On Tuesday, the mobile device security firm iVerify is publishing findings from a spyware detection feature it launched in May. Of 2,500 device scans that the company's customers elected to submit for inspection, seven revealed infections by the notorious NSO Group malware known as Pegasus.

The company’s Mobile Threat Hunting feature uses a combination of malware signature-based detection, heuristics, and machine learning to look for anomalies in iOS and Android device activity or telltale signs of spyware infection. For paying iVerify customers, the tool regularly checks devices for potential compromise. But the company also offers a free version of the feature for anyone who downloads the iVerify Basics app for $1. These users can walk through steps to generate and send a special diagnostic utility file to iVerify and receive analysis within hours. Free users can use the tool once a month. iVerify's infrastructure is built to be privacy-preserving, but to run the Mobile Threat Hunting feature, users must enter an email address so the company has a way to contact them if a scan turns up spyware—as it did in the seven recent Pegasus discoveries.

“The really fascinating thing is that the people who were targeted were not just journalists and activists, but business leaders, people running commercial enterprises, people in government positions,” says Rocky Cole, chief operating officer of iVerify and a former US National Security Agency analyst. “It looks a lot more like the targeting profile of your average piece of malware or your average APT group than it does the narrative that’s been out there that mercenary spyware is being abused to target activists. It is doing that, absolutely, but this cross section of society was surprising to find.”

Seven out of 2,500 scans may sound like a small group, especially in the somewhat self-selecting customer base of iVerify users, whether paying or free, who want to be monitoring their mobile device security at all, much less checking specifically for spyware. But the fact that the tool has already found a handful of infections at all speaks to how widely the use of spyware has proliferated around the world. Having an easy tool for diagnosing spyware compromises may well expand the picture of just how often such malware is being used.

“NSO Group sells its products exclusively to vetted US & Israel-allied intelligence and law enforcement agencies,” NSO Group spokesperson Gil Lainer told WIRED in a statement. "Our customers use these technologies daily.”

iVerify says that it took significant investment to develop the detection tool because mobile operating systems like Android, and particularly iOS, are more locked down than traditional desktop operating systems and don't allow monitoring software to have kernel access at the heart of the system. Cole says that the crucial insight was to use telemetry taken from as close to the kernel as possible to tune machine learning models for detection. Some spyware, like Pegasus, also has characteristic traits that make it easier to flag. In the seven detections, Mobile Threat Hunting caught Pegasus using diagnostic data, shutdown logs, and crash logs. But the challenge, Cole says, is in refining mobile monitoring tools to reduce false positives.

Developing the detection capability has already been invaluable, though. Cole says that it helped iVerify identify signs of compromise on the smartphone of Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a lawyer and Sikh political activist who was the target of an alleged, foiled assassination attempt by an Indian government employee in New York City. The Mobile Threat Hunting feature also flagged suspected nation state activity on the mobile devices of two Harris-Walz campaign officials—a senior member of the campaign and an IT department member—during the presidential race.

“The age of assuming that iPhones and Android phones are safe out of the box is over,” Cole says. “The sorts of capabilities to know if your phone has spyware on it were not widespread. There were technical barriers and it was leaving a lot of people behind. Now you have the ability to know if your phone is infected with commercial spyware. And the rate is much higher than the prevailing narrative.”

_Updated at 12:12 pm EST, December 4, 2024, to include a statement from NSO Group._

A New Phone Scanner That Detects Spyware Has Already Found 7 Pegasus Infections

Researchers reveal major vulnerabilities in popular corporate VPN clients, allowing remote attacks. Discover the NachoVPN tool and expert…

Researchers reveal major vulnerabilities in popular corporate VPN clients, allowing remote attacks. Discover the NachoVPN tool and expert advisories to mitigate these critical security risks.

In a recent presentation at SANS HackFest Hollywood 2024, cybersecurity researchers at London, England-based firm AmberWolf have revealed critical security vulnerabilities in widely used corporate Virtual Private Network (VPN) clients allowing attackers to target macOS and Windows systems.

These vulnerabilities, found in both traditional SSL-VPN clients and modern Zero Trust solutions, could be exploited by attackers to gain remote code execution and elevated privileges on end-user devices.

The researchers found that VPN clients, while essential for secure remote access, often have deep system access. This makes them attractive and possibly a lucrative target for hackers.

The main problem lies in how these clients trust VPN servers. Attackers can create malicious VPN servers that exploit this trust, allowing them to run commands and gain administrator-level access to a user’s computer with little to no user interaction.

****NachoVPN****

To help the security community understand and mitigate these risks, the researchers have released NachoVPN, an open-source tool that simulates the attack scenarios discussed in their presentation. This tool acts as a malicious VPN server and shows how it can exploit weaknesses in different VPN clients. NachoVPN is designed to be easy to use and can be adapted to test for new vulnerabilities as they are discovered.

_“_NachoVPN serves as a proof-of-concept tool to simulate rogue VPN servers capable of exploiting these vulnerabilities, AmberWolf researchers wrote in their blog post. _“_It showcases how insecure behaviours in VPN clients can be leveraged to gain privileged code execution._“_

Alongside NachoVPN, the researchers have published detailed advisories documenting the specific vulnerabilities disclosed during their presentation. These advisories provide technical descriptions, attack vectors, and mitigation recommendations to help organizations protect themselves against these threats.

****Vulnerabilities****

The vulnerabilities affect popular corporate VPN clients, including Palo Alto GlobalProtect and SonicWall NetExtender for Windows. The advisories, identified as CVE-2024-5921 and CVE-2024-29014, highlight the risks of remote code execution and privilege escalation via malicious VPN servers.

****NachoVPN on GitHub****

For more information about NachoVPN and the disclosed vulnerabilities, interested parties can visit the project’s **GitHub** repository and review the detailed advisories. The researchers’ presentation from SANS HackFest Hollywood 2024 is also available on the SANS YouTube channel, providing further insights into their findings and recommendations.

1.  ASUS and NordVPN Partner to Integrate VPN into Routers
2.  Hackers Calling Employees to Steal VPN Logins from Firms
3.  Ivanti VPN Flaws Exploited by DSLog Backdoor, Crypto Miners
4.  Cisco Fixes High-Severity Code Execution, VPN Hijacking Flaws
5.  Hackers Use Stolen VPN Access against Ivanti Users Despite Patches

AmberWolf Launches NachoVPN Tool to Tackle VPN Security Risks

Freshly released court documents reveal new details on controversial Israeli spyware firm's operations.

Source: Shubham singh 007 via Shutterstock

Israel's NSO Group may know a lot more about how customers use its Pegasus commercial spyware product than the company has let on, newly released court documents connected to a legal dispute with Meta's WhatsApp suggest.

In fact, NSO Group installed and operated the spyware on behalf of its customers, making the company directly liable for the spyware's use, WhatsApp lawyers said in one court filing, released Nov. 14 in the US District Court for the Northern District of California.

The court documents are part of a lawsuit that WhatsApp filed against NSO Group in October 2019 after discovering the Israeli firm had used WhatsApp servers to distribute Pegasus to some 1,400 mobile phones, including those belonging to journalists and rights activists.

The lawyers also claimed that NSO Group repeatedly developed and used exploits for abusing WhatsApp's servers to install Pegasus on target devices, including at least once after WhatsApp had sued the company over the issue.

**NSO 'Solely Responsible'**

"NSO is solely responsible for Pegasus’s unauthorized access to WhatsApp's servers," the social media giant noted in one briefing. "Despite what NSO has claimed, its customers had a minimal role in how the spyware tool operated or collected information. All that NSO Group customers typically had to do was enter their target's phone number, press install and wait for the malware to install on the target device without any further interaction," they noted.

Related:Trustwave-Cybereason Merger Boosts MDR Portfolio

"In other words, the customer simply places an order for a target device's data, and NSO controls every aspect of the data retrieval and delivery process through its design of Pegasus," WhatsApp's lawyers said. The company, in fact, was so aware of how customers were using its malware that it actually disconnected service to 10 customers for excessive abuse, the lawyers claimed.

**Controversial Surveillance Software**

Pegasus is a controversial mobile spyware designed to secretly monitor and extract data from iOS and Android smartphones. Once installed, Pegasus can intercept messages, emails, media, and passwords, and track location data, all while evading detection by antivirus software. NSO Group claims to sell the technology solely to authorized government agencies for legitimate law enforcement, crime-fighting, and anti-terror purposes. But critics argue that the tool has been misused, particularly in authoritarian regimes, to target journalists, human rights activists, political dissidents, and others critical of the government.  

Related:Xiphera & Crypto Quantique Announce Partnership

A 2021 database leak revealed that NSO Group customers had, at the time, targeted more than 50,000 phone numbers for surveillance in countries like Mexico, Hungary, and India. The US government formally blacklisted the company in 2021, meaning its ability to operate in the US or do business with US entities abroad is severely restricted.

The NSO Group has tried to get US courts to dismiss WhatsApp's lawsuit against the company, citing, among other things, a lack of jurisdiction and the fact that its clients are mostly governments and therefore are not doing anything illegal. WhatsApp lawyers have sought to portray NSO Group as indeed being liable for Pegasus by attempting to tie the vendor more directly to customer use of the spyware tool.

In the newly released court documents, WhatsApp has alleged that NSO Group repeatedly and deliberated worked around the mechanisms the company put in place to prevent misuse of the secure messaging platform. One of them was a modified WhatsApp client app called the WhatsApp Installation Server (WIS) that could access WhatsApp's back-end servers in ways its own client software could not. NSO Group then developed tools named Heaven and Eden to interact with WIS in such a way as to trigger Pegasus downloads on target phones via WhatsApp. The company developed Eden after WhatsApp discovered Heaven and put up blocks against it. When WhatsApp engineers discovered Eden, NSO developed and used yet another tool, called Erised, through 2020, or after WhatsApp had filed its lawsuit.

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The WhatsApp lawsuit is one of several that NSO Group is currently battling in courts worldwide from organizations and individuals impacted by the malware. In September, Apple sought voluntary dismissal of a 2021 lawsuit it had filed against NSO Group, citing concerns over the company having to share information with the court that other spyware makers could abuse going forward.

Back when the lawsuit was filed, the NSO Group was among a handful of known purveyors of such mobile spyware software. Since then, there has been a sharp increase in the number of commercial spyware vendors, driven largely by demand from government agencies. A Google report earlier this year identified spyware vendors like NSO Group as being responsible for nearly half of all zero-day exploits it counted between mid-2014 and December 2023.

**About the Author**

Jai Vijayan is a seasoned technology reporter with over 20 years of experience in IT trade journalism. He was most recently a Senior Editor at Computerworld, where he covered information security and data privacy issues for the publication. Over the course of his 20-year career at Computerworld, Jai also covered a variety of other technology topics, including big data, Hadoop, Internet of Things, e-voting, and data analytics. Prior to Computerworld, Jai covered technology issues for The Economic Times in Bangalore, India. Jai has a Master's degree in Statistics and lives in Naperville, Ill.

WhatsApp: NSO Group Operates Pegasus Spyware for Customers

Legal documents released as part of an ongoing legal tussle between Meta's WhatsApp and NSO Group have revealed that the Israeli spyware vendor used multiple exploits targeting the messaging app to deliver Pegasus, including one even after it was sued by Meta for doing so.
They also show that NSO Group repeatedly found ways to install the invasive surveillance tool on the target's devices as

NSO Group Exploited WhatsApp to Install Pegasus Spyware Even After Meta's Lawsuit

Plus: An “AI granny” is wasting scammers’ time, a lawsuit goes after spyware-maker NSO Group’s executives, and North Korea–linked hackers take a crack at macOS malware.

In perhaps the most adorable hacker story of the year, a trio of technologists in India found an innovative way to circumvent Apple’s location restrictions on AirPod Pro 2s so they could enable the earbuds’ hearing aid feature for their grandmas. The hack involved a homemade Faraday cage, a microwave, and a lot of trial and error.

On the other end of the tech-advancements spectrum, the US military is currently testing an AI-enabled machine gun that is capable of auto-targeting swarms of drones. The Bullfrog, built by Allen Control Systems, is one of several advanced weapons technologies in the works to combat the growing threat of cheap, small drones on the battlefield.

The US Department of Justice announced this week that an 18-year-old from California has admitted to making or orchestrating more than 375 swatting attacks across the United States.

Then, of course, there’s the Donald Trump of it all. This week, we published a practical guide to protecting yourself from government surveillance. WIRED has covered the dangers of government surveillance for decades, of course. But when the president-elect is explicitly threatening to jail his political enemies—whoever that may be—now’s probably a good time to brush up on your digital best practices.

In addition to potential dragnet surveillance of US citizens, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement started ramping up its surveillance arsenal the day after Trump won reelection. Meanwhile, experts are expecting the incoming administration to roll back cybersecurity rules instituted under president Joe Biden while taking a harder line against adversarial state-sponsored hackers. And if all this political upheaval has you in the mood to protest, beware: An investigation copublished by WIRED and The Marshall Project found that mask bans instituted in several states add a complicated new layer to exercising freedom of speech.

And that’s not all. Each week, we round up the privacy and security news we didn’t cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories, and stay safe out there.

In August 2016, approximately 120,000 bitcoin—at the time worth around $71 million—were stolen in a hack on the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange. Then in 2022, as the value of cryptocurrency had rocketed skywards, law enforcement officials in New York arrested husband and wife Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan in relation to the hack and laundering the much-inflated $4.5 billion of stolen cryptocurrency. (At the time, $3.6 billion of the funds were recouped by law enforcement investigators.)

This week, after pleading guilty in 2023, Lichtenstein was sentenced to five years of jail time for conducting the hack and laundering the profits. With subsequent cryptocurrency spikes and additional seizures related to the hack, the US government has now been able to recover more than $10 billion in assets. A series of operational security failures by Lichtenstein made much of the illicit cryptocurrency easy for officials to seize, but investigators also applied sophisticated crypto-tracing methods to unpick how the funds had been stolen and subsequently moved around.

Aside from the brazen scale of the heist, Lichtenstein and Morgan gained online prominence and ridicule after their arrests due to a series of Forbes articles written by Morgan and rap videos posted to YouTube under the name of “Razzlekhan.” Morgan, who also pleaded guilty, is due to be sentenced on November 18.

**An ‘AI Granny’ Is Wasting Phone Scammers’ Time**

Scammers are increasingly adopting AI as part of their criminal toolkits—using the technology to create deepfakes, translate scripts, and make their operations more efficient. But artificial intelligence is also being turned against the scammers. British telecoms firm Virgin Media and its mobile operator O2 have created a new “AI granny” that can answer phone calls from scammers and keep them talking. The system uses different AI models, according to The Register, that listen to what a scammer says and respond immediately. In one case, the company says it kept a scammer on the line for 40 minutes and has fed others fake personal information. Unfortunately, the system (at least at the moment) can’t directly answer calls made to your phone; instead, O2 created a specific phone number for the system, which the company says it has managed to get placed in lists of numbers that scammers call.

**Alleged NSO Group Spyware Victim Adds NSO Founders and Executive to Lawsuit**

In a new legal strategy for those attempting to hold commercial spyware vendors responsible, lawyer Andreu Van den Eynde, who was allegedly hacked with NSO Group spyware, is directly accusing two of the company’s founders, Omri Lavie and Shalev Hulio, and one of its executives, Yuval Somekh, of hacking crimes in a lawsuit. The Barcelona-based human rights nonprofit Iridia announced this week that it filed the complaint in a Catalan court. Van den Eynde was reportedly a victim of a hacking campaign that used NSO’s notorious Pegasus spyware against at least 65 Catalans. Van den Eynde and Iridia originally sued NSO Group in a Barcelona court in 2022 along with affiliates Osy Technologies and Q Cyber Technologies. “The people responsible for NSO Group have to explain their concrete activities,” a legal representative for Iridia and Van den Eynde wrote in the complaint, which was written in Catalan and translated by TechCrunch.

**North Korea-Backed Hackers Are Exploring New macOS Malware**

Research published this week by the mobile device management firm Jamf found that hackers who have been linked to North Korea have been working to implant malware inside macOS applications built with a particular open-source software development kit. The campaigns focused on cryptocurrency-related targets and involved infrastructure similar to systems that have been used by North Korea’s notorious Lazarus Group. It’s unclear if the activity resulted in actual victim compromise or if it was still in a testing phase.

Financially motivated and state-backed hackers have less occasion to use malware targeting Apple’s Mac computers than hacking tools that infect Microsoft Windows or Linux desktops and servers. So when Mac malware crops up, it’s typically a niche point, but it can also be a revealing indicator of trends and priorities among hackers.

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