Tag Archive for: signals

Australia’s $1.3 billion ASIO spend signals a ‘grey zone’ war with China


Australia’s future is getting decidedly spooky. China is engaging in influence and interference attacks on our way of life. Now we’re investing billions of dollars into returning the favour.

Tucked away in a quiet corner of the federal budget was an unexpectedly large number: $1.3 billion.

Alongside were ominous names: ASIO and Signals Directorate.

And the reason was vague: Technological capabilities.

Little else was said. It is, after all, the very heart of Australia’s international espionage operations.

But Flinders University lecturer in international relations, Dr Michael Sullivan, told news.com.au the clues are in Canberra’s strategic, diplomatic and domestic posturing.

“Improved technical capabilities is the wording in the budget papers,” he says.

“That relates clearly to expanded and upgraded ‘grey zone’ activities. And that means both offensive and defensive.”

The grey zone is the murky space between international law and war. It’s where plausible deniability is at play. It’s where confusion reigns supreme.

RELATED: Warship on the move amid China tensions

Evidence of this activity is everywhere.

There is an ongoing attack on US fuel supply pipelines. The blackout of an Indian city during its border dispute with China. Data thefts from Parliament House, universities and businesses.

And that’s barely even a taste.

Avast cybersecurity expert Stephen Kho says the $1.3 billion figure may sound like a significant amount. But once spread over its 10-year term, it is relatively modest compared to our Five Eyes international intelligence-sharing partners (the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand).

“This investment is definitely a step in the right direction,” the antivirus and digital security provider adds, saying benefits from this and related cybersecurity projects will “funnel down from national security to everyday consumer security”.

Dr Sullivan says Australia already has its own established digital grey zone capabilities: “They’re operating every day. They’re focused on – but not limited to – cyber warfare. And their particular focus is the Indo-Pacific”.

It’s just that they’re now getting extra emphasis.

Threat perception

Alongside increased…

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Signal’s Founder Hacked a Notorious Phone-Cracking Device


This week, Apple’s spring product launch event was marred by a ransomware attack against one of its suppliers, Quanta Computer. The incident is notable because it involves Apple—and the release of confidential schematics—but also because it represents an intersection of multiple disturbing trends in digital extortion.

In other Apple-adjacent hacking news, Facebook researchers found that a Palestine-linked group had built custom malware to attack iOS, hidden inside a functional messaging app. Victims had to visit a third-party app store to install the malicious software, but the hackers used social engineering techniques to trick them into doing so. And speaking of Facebook, the social media giant has been implicated in yet another data exposure, this time the email addresses of millions of users who had set that information as “private” in their settings. This comes on the heels of a flaw that allowed the scraping of 500 million Facebook user phone numbers that came to light earlier this month.

We also took a look at a since-fixed bug in Clubhouse that would have allowed people to linger invisibly in rooms like ghosts and even to cause a racket, with the moderator unable to mute them or kick them out. 

And there’s more! Each week we round up all the news WIRED didn’t cover in depth. Click on the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

In December, forensics company Cellebrite—which helps authorities break into and extract data from iPhones and Android devices—claimed it could access Signal app data. This was a little bit of misdirection; it hadn’t undermined Signal’s famously sturdy encryption but rather added support for file types Signal uses to its Physical Analyzer tool. The distinction matters quite a bit. Cellebrite could basically access Signal messages once it already had your phone in hand and unlocked it, which is going to be a risk with any encrypted messaging app.

Fast forward to this week, when Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike published a blog post that details his apparently successful efforts to hack a Cellebrite’s phone-cracking device. What he found: lots of vulnerabilities, to the extent that an app could compromise a Cellebrite…

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Signal’s “disappearing messages” live on in macOS notifications

Enlarge / You may want to nicely ask your friends who use Signal on the Mac desktop to change their notification settings.

Signal, the privacy-focused voice and text messaging application, offers an attractive bit of operational security: ephemeral text messages that “self-delete” after a predetermined amount of time. There is just one small problem, however, with that feature on the Mac desktop version of the application, as information security consultant Alec Muffett discovered: if you sent a self-deleting message to someone using the macOS application, the message lives on in macOS’s Notifications history.

Ars reproduced the problem, which Patrick Wardle of Objective See conducted a particularly deep dive on—revealing that the problem is in part a bug in the way Signal handles calls to the macOS notification system, and in part is just how macOS notifications work.

Messages that self delete from Signal still show up in notifications

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Biz & IT – Ars Technica

Security Master Launch Signals Smarter Privacy and Mobile Security – Top Tech News


Top Tech News

Security Master Launch Signals Smarter Privacy and Mobile Security
Top Tech News
SAN FRANCISCO, May 25, 2017 — Cheetah Mobile Inc. (NYSE: CMCM), the leading developer of mission-critical mobile utility and security applications, today announced the launch of Security Master. Security Master is the next generation of CM Security, …

mobile security – read more