-
Russia appears to be targeting journalists with spyware known as Pegasus.
-
Pegasus is a “zero-click” software, hacking phones by sending texts that don’t need to be opened.
-
The software has targeted dozens of journalists, activists, and politicians in recent years.
They do, and they’ve shared the counter measure (lockdown mode) with the world.
If a nation state will individually target someone, they don’t need to doom scroll on insta (nor do they need to). Locking down the phone to the bare minimum for these kind of people is the appropriate level of response.
How is this a solution? 🤔 and whats the “solution” for android?
I don’t know Android. Sorry. Doesn’t locking down to very very limited hardened features goes against everything Android is (highly flexible customizable for power users who’d want to do that kind of stuff)?
If the feature can be turned on and off by the user then I don’t think it goes against anything right, they’d still have the power?🤔 but locking down everything doesnt seem like a great fix for the average user. Bug fixes should be the real fix
As much as I want to believe this is effective, all it looks to do is turn your phone into… a phone.
If they can get cell records, they can track you.
SMS isn’t end-to-end encrypted, once it leaves your phone to the network it’s fair game. Given that Russia controls Russian Telecom, you can be fairly certain that a phone call and an SMS are monitored.
At that point, you’re left with the old school one-time pad. And I can bet on Russia being Russia, so if they see a one-time pad in use, they’re just going to pick you up and beat you
to deathuntil you talk.Which is why these people don’t use sms or standard calling. They use something like Signal.
Signal is great but if the phone itself is compromised it won’t help much.
Lockdown mode was released as a countermeasure specifically against Pegasus the first time it made the rounds as it disables many ways that are commonly exploited as the initial vector point - mainly attachments, links and previews in texts, as well as certain complex web browsing technologies.
I’ve had Lockdown mode on since it’s been released. I miss having 2FA code autofilled from text messages, and there’s the occasional website that’ll need to be whitelisted as it may display an emoji instead of a custom font… but aside from that, it’s barely an inconvenience.
Your telco is always going to be a weak point in a scenario like this, but better that than your phone because a hostile actor sent you a text message that embedded silent persistent spyware.