GoKawiil
Tech News
Following Apple's October 29 wave of threat notifications warning potential spyware targets in 99 countries, Thai officials met with Apple representatives to discuss the alerts sent to local politicians. Thailand's Digital Economy and Society Minister Chaichanok Chidchob said receiving an alert doesn't confirm a device was compromised, and authorities have no evidence linking the attempts to NSO Group's Pegasus spyware.
Apple's Lockdown Mode, a feature that restricts iPhone functionality to block sophisticated spyware attacks, blocked the 2023 'Blastpass' exploit that installed Pegasus spyware via iMessage on unprotected devices. Apple pays double its usual bug bounty to researchers who find ways to bypass the feature, and allows users to exempt specific contacts, apps, and websites from its restrictions, though doing so reduces protection.
Researchers at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab identified a technique called 'AdFection' in which an Israeli ad-tech company, Discover-Tech, allegedly exploited real-time ad-bidding systems to deliver spyware without requiring any user clicks. The report says this method was used to help spyware vendor Candiru, now rebranded as Integrity Labs, infect at least 45 devices belonging to Al-Jazeera staff.