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The original was posted on /r/worldnews by /u/TalcMine on 2023-10-09 19:50:59.
Vietnam tried to hack U.S. officials, CNN with posts on X, probe finds
Submitted 2 years ago by bot@lemmit.online [bot] to worldnews@lemmit.online
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/09/vietnam-predator-hack-investigation/
autotldr@lemmings.world [bot] 2 years ago
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Like its better-known competitor Pegasus, Predator is a powerful and hard to detect surveillance program that can turn on the microphones and cameras of Apple iPhones and devices running on Google’s Android software, retrieve all files and read private messages, even when they are end-to-end encrypted.
Officials were acting under a March executive order that set out policies to encourage “the use of commercial spyware … consistent with respect for the rule of law, human rights, and democratic norms and values.”
The new hacking attempts followed lengthy conversations and technology shipments between Vietnamese agencies and subsidiaries of the spyware’s creators, according to documents made available to the Paris-based news outlet Mediapart and the Hamburg-based weekly Der Spiegel.
“As a Predator customer is clearly in the process of learning in a painful way, exploiting across Twitter is a terrible idea,” said researcher John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab, which did its own investigation and said it agreed with Amnesty’s findings.
Managers from the French firm Nexa and their Dubai-based sister company, Advanced Middle East Systems, which was part of the Intellexa Alliance from at least 2019 to 2021, arranged the sale of Predator to Vietnam, documents show.
Nexa, which has also supplied French intelligence services, declined to respond to questions about specific deals with Vietnam but told the EIC that it respects “all applicable regulations” governing spyware exports.
The original article contains 3,003 words, the summary contains 226 words. Saved 92%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!