EU parliament member hit by Israeli Candiru spyware

It’s a minor effort compared to the hundreds of millions Iran, China, and Russia have spent for a decade on influence operations.

Those get little air time in hard progressive or far right spaces since these anti liberal influence operations mostly promote hard progressive and far right perspectives.

might I suggest that 'allowed discussion' isn't at all a metric by which to judge whether or not there are efforts to delegitimize a topic.

might I also suggest that sufficiently skilled efforts to direct a conversation will not be detected by most conversation participants.

It obviously wasn't the top comment when I posted it. When I came into the discussion most were about not attributing it to the state in question despite no evidence either way, and downplaying it. And, the fact that my comment has come to the top means that it has seemingly resonated with a lot of users with similar experiences (~+70pts).

If you do actually follow the topic very closely, or read one or two comments further down in this thread you would have come across this link to pro-israeli astro turfing zoom call tutorials by the idf https://www.leefang.com/p/inside-the-pro-israel-information and many other examples

Or what? Your comment was truncated for me.

I can see that there is way less interest in Russia China stuff with additional positions against these countries. There where usually is rationally irrationality takes place and most people avoid to say anything.

You're right this is HN not 4chan, because none of the things you said have actually happened here and people can easily have good respectful debate. It feels like you're attempting to use this as a way to silence debate around the country of origin rather than anything else

So if I find a lunatic IDF member saying kill all Palestinians you would agree to stop debating this issue out of safety risks against arabs?

You're referring to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41066729. That comment was rightly flagkilled by users, but I believe you misread it. It was sarcastic and meant the opposite of what it appeared to be saying. In other words, it was more or less agreeing with your own view.

HN does get some genuinely antisemitic comments, most of which get posted by one or two serial trolls who keep making new accounts. We ban those whenever we see their latest incarnations—it's a whack-a-mole thing.

Edit: please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41071782 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41071809 also. I've replied in each place you posted this because people often jump to wrong conclusions about the community and it's important not to do that.

There's nothing exactly like HN out there. But EU tech. news sites exist (most have a linux focus though and you'll need to use machine translation):

https://www.theregister.com/

https://linuxnews.de/

https://www.root.cz/

https://www.golem.de/

https://www.heise.de/ct

https://www.computerbase.de/

https://gnulinux.ch/

https://www.linux-magazin.de/

English is required for IT.

Exactly, it's far more likely than not. It's just a question of how much. I wish this influence was catalogued and publicised like russia.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and we have to ban accounts that keep doing it.

In this case you triggered another commenter into a complete misunderstanding (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41066935), taking your comment to be not only serious but also representative of the community. Given the high level of inflammation around this topic (everywhere, including on HN), that is seriously not cool.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and sticking to the rules in the future, we'd appreciate it. It looks like you've been breaking them for quite a long time, not just with drive-by flamebait like the above and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41066717, but also with ideological battle comments generally. If you want to keep posting here, we need you (as with any other user) to drop that.

What on earth do you consider the common thread between those two names?

To be fair it is a pretty cool/appropriate name for their line of work

Our corporate processes have established that using "Fish That Swims Up Your Penis" as the name of the product might contribute to 1% sales decrease. Having in mind our focus on maximizing the profit by appealing to widest audience possible, this is the core reason why we're strongly against the chosen name. Instead, we suggest conducting market research which will determine the optiminal naming scheme for our products. We are very big and very serious.

Am I to believe that they have exploits for every browser engine on every OS that infect my phone just by visiting a page?

This has been the reality of mobile phone security for almost a decade now. Any sufficiently-complex digital system will be rife with UB and exploits.

I would guess/assume that work phones of MEPs are restricted to a specific set of manufacturers and models, which makes targeting different from having to consider all options.

They might also have specific software installed across most of them that could be part of the targeting.

Very. These companies pay good money for 0 days and invest considerable effort into finding their own.

Also these attacks are aimed at individuals and executed by state actors. They likely already knew what phone, OS, and browser the MEP was using and selected an appropriate attack from the catalog.

Yes, but the exploits are so valuable/expensive that they’ll only use them during targeted operations. Otherwise they risk burning the exploit. So just remain uninteresting and you should be safe.

Would cost a few million dollars upfront with effectively zero marginal cost. Less than buying one tank or starting a McDonalds.

That's why I disable HTML in emails

Zero click exploits are a thing, but they are very expensive and have limited shelf life (once they have been used a few times, they tend to get found out and patched). Most actors won’t use one, unless it is a very, very high value target. It seems that the EU parliament member was not high value enough, and got lucky.

not all of them are zero click :)

Spear phishing is usually inclusive of attacks from an email that involve tricking the user into doing something unsafe. E.g. see definition https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/definition/spea...

If the claims are correct, just opening the link would have compromised the phone

I'm not sure if that is being claimed. The twitter post just said the link would have "exposed" them to spyware. One possible interpretation is that simply viewing the link in a web browser would be enough, but i think another interpretation is that the link contained some sort of malicious download. No way to know with the info we are given. I agree that a zero-day in a web browser would certainly be more interesting, i'm just not sure that is the case here.

I took it as OP being aware of their comment going to sound like it but wasn’t their intention

Also if you are profiting from spying your allies is generally frowned upon.

The post does not claim the EU parliament member was targeted by an organization with official credentials.

Thanks for the transparency!