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Kim Zetter Profile picture
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20 Jul, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Hmm. NSO CEO says he heard about list of phone #s last month. "an information broker...said that there is a list circulating in the market and that whoever holds it is saying that the NSO servers in Cyprus were hacked... We don't have servers in Cyprus" calcalistech.com/ctech/articles…
NSO's CEO says: "two different clients...said that brokers have come to them claiming...they have a list related to NSO. We looked over [list]...and it slowly became clear to us that it is an HLR Lookup server and has nothing to do with NSO. We understood that this was a joke"
NSO's CEO adds: "This is an attempt to build something based on a crazy lack of information. They say that the list was leaked, but where was it leaked from?... Who does it belong to? Who held it? Why don't we have this information? This is the absurdity here."
NSO's CEO: "the average for our clients is 100 targets a year. If you take NSO's entire history, you won't reach 50,000 Pegasus targets since the company was founded. Pegasus has 45 clients, with around 100 targets per client a year."
"they [said] the editor of the FT claiming that she was also a target. We checked and she was never a target of any [NSO] client. Regarding the wife of... Jamal Khashoggi... she was not a target... Perhaps she was the target of something else and appears in HLR searches."

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More from @KimZetter

Kim Zetter Profile picture
22 Jul
Amnesty says the Israeli media mis-reported a statement it gave them in Hebrew about the list of 50,000 phone numbers. See here: thewire.in/tech/fact-chec…

But I obtained the full Hebrew statement they gave reporters, and the Israeli media quoted it correctly. ImageImage
As I noted in tweet yesterday, Amnesty International's Israeli spokesman sent Hebrew statement to Israeli media saying "Amnesty has never presented this list as 'NSO's Pegasus Spyware List', although some of the world's media may have done so." That is in fact what statement said
The issue is Israeli media pulled quotes from lengthy Amnesty statement without context around the quotes, which gave better picture of what Amnesty was saying. My tweets quoted Israeli media report, which was all I could see. But now you can see Amnesty's entire statement.
Read 6 tweets
Kim Zetter Profile picture
21 Jul
Amnesty says it never claimed list was NSO: "Amnesty International has never presented this list as a 'NSO Pegasus Spyware List', although some of the world's media may have done so..list indicative of the interests of the company's clients"
calcalist.co.il/technology/art…
h/t @ersincmt
"Amnesty, and the investigative journalists and media outlets they work with have made clear from the outset in very clear language that this is a list of numbers marked as numbers of interest to NSO customers" - meaning they are the kind of ppl NSO clients might like to spy on
So Amnesty is essentially saying now that the list contains the *kind* of people NSO's clients would ordinarily be interested in spying on, but the list isn't specifically a list of people who were spied on -- though a very small subset of people on the list were indeed spied on
Read 4 tweets
Kim Zetter Profile picture
17 Jul
Israel secretly authorized Israeli cyber-surveillance firms to work for gov of Saudi Arabia, despite international condemnation of kingdom’s abuse of surveillance tools to crush dissent and even after Saudi killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi
nytimes.com/2021/07/17/wor…
After murder of Khashoggi, NSO Group canceled its contracts w/ Saudi Arabia amid accusations that its tools were being misused by the kingdom. But Israeli gov encouraged NSO and two other firms to continue working w/ Saudis, and issued new license for a fourth to do similar work
Israel has licensed 4 Israeli firms to sell surveillance software to Saudis - NSO Group, Candiru, Verint, and Quadream. "Cellebrite, which manufactures physical hacking systems for mobile phones, has also sold its services to the Saudi gov, but without ministry approval"
Read 8 tweets
Kim Zetter Profile picture
14 Jul
DoJ did something remarkable when it sought email records of WaPo journos - not from an email provider but from the security firm Proofpoint. Why do this? I discuss reasons👇. DNS records show Proofpoint filtering Post email since 2015, CNN email since '17 zetter.substack.com/p/justice-depa…
DNS record shows Proofpoint server (pphosted.com) filtering WaPo email, which is why DoJ went after them for email data. Experts told me the move is troubling. It signals DoJ is willing to seek info from any company that touches comms, regardless of how tangential.
"it’s a warning to customers that even if their [email or cloud] provider has strong protections against improper law enforcement requests, the government 'can bypass that by going to a service provider that layers on top of that provider,'" EFF's @kurtopsahl told me.
Read 6 tweets
Kim Zetter Profile picture
13 Jul
This feels like someone in Iran studied the Khashoggi murder as a masterclass in how to handle dissidents living on US soil
From the indictment of four Iranian intelligence officials charged with conspiracy to kidnap an Iranian journalist author and human rights activist based in Brooklyn, and take that person back to Iran, "where the victim’s fate would have been uncertain at best"
Note this from the indictment: "Farahani and his network procured the services of private investigators to surveil, photograph and video record Victim-1 and Victim-1’s household members in Brooklyn....
Read 10 tweets
Kim Zetter Profile picture
6 Jul
Chair of the Federal Reserve and CEOs of the largest US banks said in recent months that their biggest concern is a cyberattack against the financial sector. I wrote about what could happen if a systemic cyberattack targeted the financial sector. nytimes.com/2021/07/03/bus…
Experts say country is not prepared for a systemic cyberattack on Wall Street if it targets core institutions/infrastructure that provide key services. "[E]everybody believes an institution can be taken out... What we don’t know is how bad it would get and how fast,” experts said
Financial sector could withstand one large institution being knocked ou, but if multiple ones shut down, disruption could last wks. If attackers struck on a “triple witching” Friday when stock options/stock index futures/stock index options all expire, effects would be amplified.
Read 4 tweets

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