APNewsBreak: Undercover agents target cybersecurity watchdog
APNewsBreak: Undercover agents target cybersecurity watchdog
NEW YORK (AP) — The researchers who reported that Israeli software was used to spy on Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s inner circle before his gruesome death are being targeted in turn by international undercover operatives, The Associated Press has found.
Twice in the past two months, men masquerading as socially conscious investors have lured members of the Citizen Lab internet watchdog group to meetings at luxury hotels to quiz them for hours about their work exposing Israeli surveillance and the details of their personal lives. In both cases, the researchers believe they were secretly recorded.
[...] https://www.apnews.com/9f31fa2aa72946c694555a5074fc9f42 I was happy to see that Israeli malware vendor NSO has "zero competence" in the field of human intelligence, and that their efforts to penetrate Citizen Labs harmed no one's interests but their own. The academic security researchers from Citizen Lab spotted NSO's wannabe intelligence officers as hostiles at once, which comes as no surprise: "Security is security" in any context. The Citizen Lab guise demonstrated a real understanding of their subject matter by taking effective steps to steal the initiative early, with (apparently) decisive results. https://citizenlab.ca/ :o)
‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Saturday, January 26, 2019 9:46 PM, Steve Kinney <admin@pilobilus.net> wrote:
... https://www.apnews.com/9f31fa2aa72946c694555a5074fc9f42
I was happy to see that Israeli malware vendor NSO has "zero competence" in the field of human intelligence, and that their efforts to penetrate Citizen Labs harmed no one's interests but their own.
Another update: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/world/black-cube-nso-citizen-lab-intellig... """ “Michel Lambert” is a pseudonym and the Paris company he claimed to represent does not exist. The New York Times, in collaboration with Uvda, an investigative television show on Israel’s Channel 12, has confirmed that the mysterious visitor was Aharon Almog-Assoulin, a retired Israeli security official who until recently served on the town council in a suburb of Tel Aviv. ... The phenomenon of private spies drew widespread attention in 2017, when Black Cube, an Israeli private intelligence firm, was found to have used undercover agents to approach women who had accused Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer, of sexual misconduct. Black Cube later was identified as having sent agents, again under false cover, to investigate Obama administration officials who had worked on the Iran nuclear deal. Black Cube denied that it had played any role in approaching Citizen Lab employees, but the same undercover agent turned up in an earlier case in Canada with a Black Cube connection. """ best regards,
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Steve Kinney