Now Pres. Macky Sall @Macky_Sall flirts with same destructive idea.
I was working from #Senegal in 2012 & saw how far then-President Wade had gone astray from initial high hopes.
Like bringing in North Koreans to erect a pricey monument, then demanding a 35% cut of ticket prices because he felt the idea was his intellectual property.
When Pres. Wade tried to extend his term in 2012, #Senegal's people backed him down.
Here are some more damming revelations as Intellexa, the shady, sanctioned spyware supplier gets exposed by @AmnestyTech & partners.. /1
2/ First, a mercenary spyware myth has just been busted.
Because the leak shows an Intellexa employee directly accessing a customer deployment.
Prior to the #PredatorFiles leak, spyware companies basically always claimed they couldn't access customer deployments & didn't know what was going on there.
They used this to avoid responsibility & claim ignorance when faced with abuses.
3/ And it gets crazier. The leak shows Intellexa casually accessing a core backbone of Predator deployment of a government customer.
Seemingly without the gov's knowledge.
Suggests that Intellexa can look over their shoulder & watch their sensitive targeting.
NEW: 🇨🇳Chinese hackers ran massive campaign by tricking Claude's agentic AI.
Vibe hacking ran 80-90% of the operation without humans.
Massive scale (1000s of reqs/sec).
Agents ran complex multi-step tasks, shepherded by a human.
Long predicted. Welcome to the new world.
Fascinating report by @AnthropicAI 1/
2/ The old cybersecurity pitch: unpatched systems are the threat.
The next generation concern might be unpatched cognition.
The attacker jailbroke the cognitive layer of @anthropic's Claude code, successfully convincing the system of false intent (that it was a security exercise)
3/ One of the key points in @AnthropicAI's report is just how limited the human time required was to run such a large automated campaign.
Obviously powerful stuff, highlighting the impact of orchestration.
And concerning for the #cybersecurity world for all sorts of reasons, ranging from attack scale, adaptability & cost reductions...
A "damaging" leak of tools from a five eyes exploit developer?
Concerning. We need to know what's under this rug.
Big picture: "trusted, vetted" private sector players offensive cyber are not immune to losing control of tooling... with national security consequences 1/
2/ If true, a tooling leak at boutique firm Trenchant wouldn't be the first time that exploits from commercial offensive vendors wind up... in the wrong place.
Many questions.
In the meantime. Remember when Russian APT29..was caught with exploits first used by NSO & Intellexa?
3/ There will always be a push for states to turn towards the private sector to meet offensive needs.
It's appealing. For some, it's very lucrative.
But in practice it brings unavoidable counterintelligence & national security downside risk that shouldn't be downplayed.