A sophisticated information piracy campaign that was previously detected in security flaws on Android, Windows and iOS devices is really the job of “Western government agents” conducting an “anti-terrorist operation,” according to a new report by MIT Technology Review.
The campaign in question, yes gained more and more attention of the media in recent weeks, was the first written about in January, by Google’s threat research team, Project Zero. Back then, all that was publicly known was this someone had dealt with very complicated business: a “highly sophisticated” group, probably made up of “expert teams”, was in charge of orientation The researchers wrote that there were numerous zero-day vulnerabilities (the total total would later be 11) in several prominent operating systems.
This hacking campaign, which ended for about nine months, used the so-called “Irrigation hole” method—In which a threatening actor injects malicious code into a website to “catch” it effectively (site visitors will later be infected with malicious software, allowing the hacker to target and scale the engagement of certain targets).
Of all these descriptors, the signs naturally pointed to the involvement of some sort of high-level hacker, though few would have imagined that the culprits were, in fact, our friends. Still, that would seem to be the case. It is not clear which government is really responsible for the attacks, who their targets were or what the so-called “anti-terrorist” operation related to all this entailed. MIT has not disclosed how they came to this information.
One thing is certain: Google’s discovery and subsequent public disclosure of the exploits (as well as the company’s decision to correct the vulnerabilities) has apparently derailed any government operation that took place. MIT writes that, by going public, the tech company effectively shut down a “live anti-terrorism” cyber mission, adding that “it’s unclear whether Google previously warned government officials that they would advertise and shut down” the attacks. Apparently, this “has caused internal divisions in Google and raised questions for the U.S. intelligence communities and their allies.”
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There are a lot of questions here, obviously. First, what government was doing this? What was the “terror” threat they were investigating? What websites were used to pursue these terrorists? Given the sensitive political nature of such operations, it is unlikely that we will get answers to these questions, at least not immediately. But because there is so little information available, it is also quite difficult to understand whether Project Zero had the justification to carry out the operation or not, or what was even going on here.
Apparently, Google knows who the hackers are and MIT reports that the incident has sparked a debate in the company about whether counterterrorism operations like this should be considered “out of bounds” for public disclosure or whether it was up to them to disclose vulnerabilities to “protect users and make the Internet safer.” .