Kristian's Internet Wanderings
Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. (Philip K. Dick)
Dutch Newspaper De Volkskrant has published the story of how the Dutch Intelligence Services (AIVD) hacked the infamous Russian hacking group Cosybear / APT29 and monitored how they hacked into the US and how this was fought withe the Americans. Also on the aftermath of these findings being made public by the Trump Administration. Another country now deeply skeptical to sharing Intel with the US along the previous leaks made this year.
[Update] More info can be found at Nieuwsuur.
I suppose every new technology will eventually be misused, and this has now come to machine learning and facial recognition algorithms. As reported by Motherboard an app has been launched on reddit using NVIDA’s CUDA framework to morph faces onto another body, to create realistic videos as an outcome. Of course (in an forum dominated by teenage boys) the initial activity is to use celebrity faces in porn scenes, but it raises another worry about trusting digital images and video files in a wider use of this technology.
Kapersky has released an advisory on Securelist on a new major Android Malware, originating (it seems) from Italy. Skygofree (as it has been named) goes above and beyond what has been seen before. Skygofree is capable of taking pictures, capturing video, and seizing call records, text messages, gelocation data, calendar events, and business-related information stored in device memory. Skygofree also includes the ability to automatically record conversations and noise when an infected device enters a location specified by the person operating the malware. Also a clever use of Androids Accessibility Service gives backdoor access to Whatsapp. Deeper analysis leads to finding a set of windows components indicating an almost full Windows implementation of the above.
For those looking to validate if they are impacted, here are the indicators.
