Elon Musk’s talk of slimming Twitter’s staff and letting people post anything allowed by law is expected to clash with the reality of fending off hackers, trolls, police and regulators, experts say.
Only high-end criminal gangs or state-sponsored actors could hack a phone in the way a man accused of sexually abusing a teenage girl claims happened to him, an expert has told the court.
MoD-trained forensic expert and ethical hacker Tony Haddow said it was “extremely unlikely” a hacker could have gained remote access to Trevor Fernandes’s Samsung to set up an encrypted partition without his knowledge.
Fernandes is charged with convincing a Texan girl to strip naked and perform lewd acts on herself, her baby sister and pet dog, before threatening to release sexually explicit images of her unless she complied with his every instruction.
The messages, sent on Instagram and Kik, were traced by American police back to the 37-year-old’s address in Swindon, and by the National Crime Agency to his Samsung Galaxy S10, where he had an encrypted partition that held the apps in question.
Swindon Crown Court heard yesterday that Fernandes “denied all knowledge” of the partition, known as Knox, and claimed “someone else hacked into his phone”.
‘China and Russia would have that capability’
Today (May 13), Mr Haddow told the court that only a hostile, state-sponsored actor such as Russia or China, or a high-end criminal gang, could hack into the phone to set up Knox to open biometrically, and not alert the user of the phone.
He said he “wouldn’t say anything is impossible”, but when asked what skillset someone would need to be able to carry this out, he said “hostile states like China, Russia, would have that capability”.
“It’s not the capability that a general avid user would have,” he added.
In a day of evidence dedicated to forensic analysis of Fernandes’s Samsung, Mr Haddow, head of forensic at cyber security company 4Secure, was asked whether “anything is possible” once a hacker has penetrated a device.
READ MORE: Swindon man ‘used nude images to convince teen to perform sex act on dog’
“It is a very specialised skillset,” he told jurors. “Someone would have to be pretty determined.”
Later, Mr Haddow cited the Israeli government’s Pegasus malware, exposed in 2016, where he said that it was…
Government has moved a step closer to closing the net on cyber criminals after the Cyber Security and Data Protection Bill was passed in parliament this Tuesday.
The clock is ticking for cyber criminals as the government is finalising a policy document that will effectively curb cyber-related offences and provide data protection for citizens.
United Kingdom based Cyber Security expert, Dr Samuel Chindaro is confident the Bill which now awaits Presidential assent will be pivotal in addressing the scourge of internet hacking and card cloning, among other illicit cyber activities that have bled the economy of millions of dollars.
“This was a long overdue process and I believe this is one of the avenues where government will be able to seriously address cyber-crimes that have seriously exposed both corporates and individuals,” he said.
According to data from the country’s specialised serious crimes unit, computer generated crimes have seen millions of dollars being siphoned from local companies and individuals.
The Cyber Security Report 2021 released last week reveals that Zimbabwe is among Africa countries facing the most common cyber security threats such malware, web-application attacks, email phishing and impersonation, identity theft, data breaches and denial of services.
If signed into law, the Cyber Bill which amends the country’s criminal code for cyber-crime will provide for the investigation and collection of evidence and data breaches, resulting in the admissibility of electronic evidence in court.
– ZBC