Day: September 13, 2021

A cyber surveillance company based in Israel developed a tool to break into Apple iPhones with a never-before-seen technique that has been in use since February, internet security watchdog group Citizen Lab said Monday.

The discovery is important because of the critical nature of the vulnerability, which requires no user interaction and affects all versions of Apple’s iOS, OSX, and watchOS, except for those updated Monday.

The vulnerability developed by the Israeli firm, named NSO Group, defeats security systems designed by Apple in recent years.

Apple said it fixed the vulnerability in Monday’s software update, confirming Citizen Lab’s finding. An Apple spokesperson declined to comment regarding whether the hacking technique came from NSO Group.

In a statement to Reuters, NSO did not confirm or deny that it was behind the technique, saying only that it would “continue to provide intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world with life-saving technologies to fight terror and crime.”

Citizen Lab said it found the malware on the phone of an unnamed Saudi activist and that the phone had been infected with spyware in February. It is unknown how many other users may have been infected.

The intended targets would not have to click on anything for the attack to work. Researchers said they did not believe there would be any visible indication that a hack had occurred.

The vulnerability lies in how iMessage automatically renders images. IMessage has been repeatedly targeted by NSO and other cyber arms dealers, prompting Apple to update its architecture. But that upgrade has not fully protected the system.

“Popular chat apps are at risk of becoming the soft underbelly of device security. Securing them should be top priority,” said Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Railton.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency had no immediate comment.

Explosion in attacks

Citizen Lab said multiple details in the malware overlapped with prior attacks by NSO, including some that were never publicly reported. One process within the hack’s code was named “setframed,” the same name given in a 2020 infection of a device used by journalists at Al Jazeera, the researchers found.

“The security of devices is increasingly challenged by attackers,” said Citizen Lab researcher Bill Marczak.

A record number of previously unknown attack methods, which can be sold for $1 million or more, have been revealed this year. The attacks are labeled “zero-day” because software companies had zero days’ notice of the problem.

New cybersecurity focus

Along with a surge in ransomware attacks against critical infrastructure, the explosion in such attacks has stoked a new focus on cybersecurity in the White House as well as renewed calls for regulation and international agreements to rein in malicious hacking.

As previously reported, the FBI has been investigating NSO, and Israel has set up a senior inter-ministerial team to assess allegations that its spyware has been abused on a global scale.

Although NSO has said it vets the governments it sells to, its Pegasus spyware has been found on the phones of activists, journalists and opposition politicians in countries with poor human rights records.

Source: Voice of America

A World Bank report released Monday suggests climate change could force 216 million people across six regions to migrate within their countries in the next 30 years, with “hotspots” emerging within the next nine years unless urgent steps are taken.

The “Groundswell Part 2” report examines how climate change is a powerful driver of migration within a nation because of its impact on people’s livelihoods through droughts, rising sea levels, crop failures and other climate-related conditions.

The original Groundswell climate report was published in 2018 and detailed projections and analysis for three world regions: sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America. “Groundswell 2” conducted similar studies on East Asia and the Pacific, North Africa, and eastern Europe and Central Asia.

Both studies established different scenarios to explore potential future outcomes and identify internal climate in- and out- migration hotspots in each region — that is, the areas from which people are expected to move, and the areas to which they might go.

The study suggests that by 2050, sub-Saharan Africa could see as many as 86 million internal climate migrants; East Asia and the Pacific, 49 million; South Asia, 40 million; North Africa, 19 million; Latin America, 17 million; and eastern Europe and Central Asia, 5 million.

To slow the factors driving climate migration and avoid these worst-case outcomes, the report recommends a series of steps world leaders can take, including reducing global emissions in line with the goals established by the Paris 2015 climate agreement, and taking steps to better understand the drivers of internal climate migration, so appropriate policies to address them can be developed.

Source: Voice of America

GENEVA – The U.N. Human Rights Council has begun its annual session in Geneva, and in an opening address Monday, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michele Bachelet warned that climate change and pollution pose grave threats to human rights and humanity itself.

The U.N. rights chief says human inaction in the face of planetary disasters is having a severe impact on a broad range of rights, including the rights to adequate food, water, education, health and even life itself.

Michele Bachelet says extreme and murderous climate events have been unleashed on people in every region in recent months.

“Monumental fires in Siberia and California; huge sudden floods in China, Germany and Turkey; Arctic heatwaves leading to unprecedented methane emissions; and the persistence of interminable drought, from Morocco and Senegal to Siberia, potentially forcing millions of people into misery, hunger, and displacement,” Bachelet said.

Bachelet warns intensifying environmental threats constitute the single greatest challenge to human rights. She says environmental disasters amplify conflicts, tensions, increase vulnerabilities, and structural inequalities around the world.

For example, she notes the humanitarian emergency in Africa’s Sahel countries is being fueled by climate change. She says long droughts followed by flash floods, unequal access to natural resources, and high rates of youth unemployment are plaguing the region.

“These trends compel people into displacement, aggravate conflicts and political instability, and fuel recruitment by violent extremist groups,” Bachelet said. “In such a situation it should be clear that there can be no purely military solution to the conflicts in the region. To date, four million people across the Sahel have been displaced, according to UNHCR estimates.”

Bachelet says similar trends and challenges exist in different forms and to varying degrees in all regions of the world. For example, Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa are gripped by water shortages causing tensions to rise over this scarce resource.

She reports climate change is having a striking impact on poverty, displacement and fundamental human rights in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. She says environmental and human rights defenders are being threatened, harassed, and even killed, often with complete impunity, in Latin America, South-East Asia and other regions.

The U.N. rights chief says a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is the foundation of human life. She adds the future of humanity depends on governments acting to preserve the world’s precious resources.

Source: Voice of America