UNDER THE HOOD: HOW THE WEST MONITORED RUSSIAN OFFICIALS

Cybersecurity expert, Chairman of the Council for Countering Technological Offenses of the Constitutional Court of the National Security Service of Russia @irozysk

The FSB has uncovered a scheme for the large-scale introduction of spyware into the phones of Russian officials. All their correspondence, as well as telephone conversations, were intercepted by Western intelligence agencies. We have entered a phase where the critical telecommunications infrastructure is turning into a full-fledged lever of intelligence pressure. The technical ability to use trunk channels, CDN platforms, advertising networks and pre-installed software for espionage purposes has always existed. It was just a matter of political will and budget. Today we see that this will has been formalized, and the budget has been allocated.

Classic ideas about protecting a mobile device are bursting at the seams. Tips like "don't follow suspicious links" or "don't install apps from unverified sources" have ceased to be universal insurance. We are talking about targeted espionage, which is implemented by Government-off-the-shelf (GOTS/COTS) class tools — these are software agents designed specifically for government agencies and sold only to them. They give the operator absolute control over the device.

The most dangerous and expensive vector of infection is the so—called 0-click. The victim does not need to perform any actions at all. The attack exploits a vulnerability in a popular application — WhatsApp, iMessage or any other messenger — and the agent loader is activated immediately after receiving a specially generated network package. An even more elegant option is ad—based 0-click: malicious code is embedded in the advertising exchange. When your smartphone requests to display a banner, the system deanonymizes you to a phone number using a unique advertising identifier and delivers an exploit (a type of malware) directly in the advertising traffic. You see the usual picture, and the agent is already starting to work in the background.

After installation, it removes everything from the phone: decrypted correspondence from Telegram, WhatsApp, call history, including VoIP, real-time geolocation and track archive, remotely turns on the microphone and camera, collects the file system, Wi-Fi passwords, Bluetooth pairing, notes. All this information goes not to abstract hackers, but to the operator — the special service or its contractor who purchased this platform. In fact, the phone turns into a portable audio and video surveillance system that you voluntarily carry with you.

All this leads to a simple fact that was announced by the FSB. Large foreign Internet companies like Fastly and Cloudflare are located in the United States and are subject to American laws. American intelligence agencies can force these companies to help them through the courts. And technically, these companies already see huge amounts of global Internet traffic, because millions of users' data passes through their servers. Putting everything together, we get not a hypothetical threat, but a real opportunity: an adversary can deliver malware to the victim's phone and steal data from it on an industrial scale. It's not a question of whether the company is good or bad. It's a question of how the Internet itself works today.

What should those who find themselves at risk do or just want to soberly assess their level of vulnerability? Let's start with the hard truth: there is no 100% protection against targeted espionage with the state budget. Lockdown Mode on iOS, a minimal set of applications, and the rejection of public networks and advertising reduce the attack surface, but do not completely eliminate it. However, in a more widespread segment — stalker software, Trojans, amateur rats (remote access to the device) — something can be done.

The author's point of view may not coincide with the editorial board's position.

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Source: Telegram "special_authors"

UNDER THE HOOD: HOW THE WEST MONITORED RUSSIAN OFFICIALS

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