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Top cyber espionage groups that have India in their crosshairs

<ul class="summary-list"><li><keyword id="790242" type="COMPANY" weightage="60" keywordseo="WhatsApp">WhatsApp</keyword> CEO Will Cathcart told <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/24/officials-who-are-us-allies-among-targets-of-nso-malware-says-whatsapp-chief">The Guardian</a> that officials of US allies were malware targets.</li><li>WhatsApp sued <keyword id="3598670" type="PERSON" weightage="60" keywordseo="NSO-Group">NSO Group</keyword> in 2019, saying the Israeli company sent malware to 1,400 devices.</li><li>"There is no such thing as an encryption backdoor for just the good guys," Cathcart said.</li></ul><p>WhatsApp CEO Will Cathcart said senior government officials of US allies, including some in national-security roles, were targets of Pegasus phone malware in 2019. </p><p>Cathcart's statements, which were featured in an interview by <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/24/officials-who-are-us-allies-among-targets-of-nso-malware-says-whatsapp-chief">The Guardian on Sunday</a>, followed reports last week from the <keyword id="11667587" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="60" keywordseo="pegasus-project">Pegasus Project</keyword>, a consortium that included The Guardian, The Washington Post, and Amnesty International.</p><p>The reports said an Israeli company sold access to <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/military-grade-spyware-company-used-to-hack-journalists-activists-executives-2021-7">military-grade spyware, </a>which was used to hack the <keyword id="10833" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="60" keywordseo="Phones">phones</keyword> of journalists, activists, and government officials.</p><p>NSO Group, the company behind the Pegasus software, denied the phone numbers leaked to the consortium were Pegasus targets.</p><p>WhatsApp sued NSO Group in October 2019, saying about 1,400 mobile devices running the app were targeted by the company's surveillance software.</p><p>According to the complaint, NSO Group had gained access to WhatsApp's servers to target "attorneys, journalists, human rights activists, political dissidents, diplomats, and other senior foreign government officials." The lawsuit is ongoing.</p><p>"The reporting matches what we saw in the attack we defeated two years ago, it is very consistent with what we were loud about then," Cathcart told The Guardian.</p><p>There were more than 50,000 phone numbers on a leaked list of potential Pegasus targets, although it was unclear how many had actually been targeted, <a href="https://forbiddenstories.org/about-the-pegasus-project/">Forbidden Stories</a> said. The list included numbers for French president Emmanuel Macron, Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan, and South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2021/07/world-leaders-potential-targets-of-nso-group-pegasus-spyware/">Amnesty International</a> said.</p><p>NSO Group said the consortium's reports were inaccurate, denying the numbers on the list were targets or potential targets of Pegasus. It said it would no longer reply to media questions about the software.</p><p>"The numbers in the list are not related to NSO group," the company said in a statement on Wednesday under the headline <a href="https://www.nsogroup.com/Newses/enough-is-enough/">Enough is Enough.</a> "Any claim that a name in the list is necessarily related to a Pegasus target or Pegasus potential target is erroneous and false."</p><p>The Pegasus software was designed to "covertly collect information about your target's relationships, location, phone calls, plans and activities - whenever and wherever they are," according to a product description included as an exhibit in WhatsApp's 2019 lawsuit.</p><p>The software tracked GPS locations, monitored voice and VoIP calls, and collected other information, the description said. It also "[l]eaves no trace on the device."</p><p>The software was reportedly sold to governments. </p><p>"There is no such thing as an encryption backdoor for just the good guys," Cathcart said on <a href="https://twitter.com/wcathcart/status/1416848433285976072?s=20">Twitter</a> last week. "A backdoor would be abused. And a backdoor would be a gift to hackers, criminals, spyware companies, and hostile governments, with dangerous consequences for safety and security."</p>

WhatsApp chief says national security officials of US allies were among those targeted with NSO malware

<br />
The existence of <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/Digital-India-Governemnt-confirms-Ankit-Fadias-appointment-as-brand-ambassador-after-denial/articleshow/49154990.cms">Ankit Fadia</a> dawned on us when he burst into our TV screens in October 2009 on <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=MTV">MTV</a>, a channel that had at the time stopped prioritizing the ‘M’ in its TV but oddly enjoyed a throne of popularity in the hearts of every teenager.<br />
<br /> The 10 minute show was called ‘<keyword id="8959" type="COMPANY" weightage="80" keywordseo="MTV">MTV</keyword> <keyword id="3081053" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="80" keywordseo="What-The-Hack">What the Hack</keyword>!’ and was developed by Fadia himself. It starred him and VJ Jose and comprised Fadia dishing out ‘informative tips, trick s and cheat codes that would make one’s life on the World Wide Web much simpler and easier.<br />
<br />
The show had a good run for two years, ending in 2009. A lot of people, including me heaved a sigh and were of the opinion that it’d be the last we hear of Fadia.<br />
<br />
But, that wasn’t it for him.<br />
<br />
Over the past few days, we’ve heard Ankita Fadia’s name everywhere- be it on social media, newspapers or even from the government.<br />
It all started when Fadia tweeted that he was appointed as a brand ambassador for Prime Minister <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=narendra+modi">Narendra Modi’s</a> pet project <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/PMO-App-Contest-Google-To-Turn-Narendra-Modis-Dream-Of-Digital-India-Into-A-Reality/articleshow/43243495.cms">‘Digital India’</a>, to which Facebook CEO <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/searchresult.cms?query=mark+zuckerberg">Mark Zuckerberg</a> also pledged his support.<br />
<br /> Amid an uproar over the authenticity of Fadia’s credentials, the government was hasty to issue a statement that it hasn’t appointed any ambassadors yet. A few hours later, the statement was taken off, with the government finally acknowledging that Fadia was indeed appointed as one of the brand ambassadors for <keyword id="1929810" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="80" keywordseo="Digital-India">Digital India</keyword>, along with three others, way back in July.<br />
<br />
While the debate continues over whether Fadia’s appointment was deserved or not, we at <strong>Business Insider</strong> present to you everything you need to know about <keyword id="155537" type="PERSON" weightage="80" keywordseo="Ankit-Fadia">Ankit Fadia</keyword>.<br />
<br /> · All of thirty years, Ankita Fadia describes himself as an Indian charlatan, author, speaker and self-proclaimed <keyword id="913028" type="UNKNOWN" weightage="80" keywordseo="ethical-hacker">ethical hacker</keyword>, His claim-to-fame was the show ‘MTV, What The Hack!’<br />
<br />
·        At the age of 15, Fadia wrote his first book on ethical hacking which made the youngest author to be published by MacMillan India. After the success of that book, he wrote a host of other books on hacking and cyber-security, all of which have sold over 25 million copies and have been bestsellers.<br />
<br />
·        Following the popularity of his books, he  he started providing his own computer security courses, including the "Ankit Fadia Certified Ethical Hacker" programme in alliance with Reliance World for which one had to pay a hefty amount of Rs 12,000. Soon IMT Ghaziabad also approached him to organize its one-year Post-Graduate diploma in Cyber-Security.<br />
<br />
·        Fadia has also received a lot of backlash and has been accused of plagarising content for his books and codes. He’s denied all of them.<br />
<br />
·        He has also made a host of other claims, starting from the fact that he had defaced the website of CHIP magazine to claiming that he had  infiltrated a group of hackers and stated that the Pakistani intelligence agencies were paying "Westerners" to deface Indian websites with anti-India or pro-Pakistan content. None of his claims have been verified.<br />
<br />
·        In a case of irony, his own website has been hacked several times, with the hackers asking him to change his profession and get back to farming.<br />
 <br />
Image credit: Indiatimes

The man of the hour: All you need to
know about Ankit Fadia

New Delhi, May 30 (IANS) Mitron, the much touted desi version of TikTok, appears to have a "Pakistan connection" as the source code of the app was originally made by developers from Pakistan, the medi reported.<br /><br />This group from Pakistan, known as Qboxus, is selling "TicTic - Android media app for creating and sharing short videos v2.5" at the CodeCanyon platform for $34 (approximately Rs 2,567).<br /><br />It is now claimed that the Mitron app is a repackaged version of TicTic, which is a TikTok clone.<br /><br />"TikTok is bad, it's Chinese. Use Mitron instead Me: Folks, Mitron is a repackaged app made by a Pakistani company," an ethical hacker who goes by the name Elliot Alderson tweeted on Saturday.<br /><br />The popularity of Mitron rose after some people promoted it as a desi version of TikTok, with downloads of the app from Google Play now touching over 50 lakh.<br /><br />The description of the app on Google Play says that it is offered by MitronTV.<br /><br />"Mitron is a free Short Video and Social Platform based out of Bengaluru, India. It is designed for people to showcase their innovative videos inline with our theme of light humour," reads the description of the app.<br /><br />There is however, nothing wrong with what the team behind Mitron short video sharing app has done.<br /><br />In fact, the CodeCanyon platform shows that the TicTic source code has been sold for over 280 times so far.<br /><br />--IANS<br /><br />gb/na

Mitron repackaged app made by developers from Pakistan: Report

<p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Warner Bros. Pictures</span></p><p class="caption">The twenty-first century heist.</p></div><p></p></div></div>Tom was trying to hack a bank.</p><p>Based in Copenhagen, he targeted a Nordic financial institution. Assisted by a team of hackers, he began by casing the joint: Working out who works for the bank, what they do, and where the bank's mainframe is located. By going after its employees, Tom's team managed to obtain passwords and logins, and almost everything required to gain access.</p><p>But there was a catch: "[The bank] had secured the mainframe so you could only access the mainframe from one building physically," Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at security company F-Secure told Business Insider.</p><p>Tom managed to get initial access to the building by going to a formal event there under false pretenses. "And then as they were being escorted out of the building he asked to be taken to the toilet, and just stays there. Doesn't come out for 45 minutes." When he finally emerged, the host escorting him had vanished.</p><p>"So then he's in his suit with his laptop, walking around this building in plain sight," Hypponen said. "But nobody cares because he seems to know what he's doing, walking with purpose," talking to people. He "sits down in an empty cubicle, takes out his laptop, connects the cable - he's in the right building - gains access to the mainframe."</p><p>Tom didn't do any damage, or attempt to move any funds. That's because he was a penetration-tester employed by F-Secure. The Nordic bank had contracted the security company to test its systems - and, <em>mission accomplished</em>, they had been found lacking</p><p>But then Tom didn't leave.</p><p>"He's getting hungry," said Hypponen. "He's like 'I can do better!' He's pinged the mainframe, it pings back in two milliseconds." The hacker set himself a new goal: "I'm going to find this mainframe, and <em>take a selfie</em> with the mainframe."</p><p>"So he's guessing it's in the basement, because that's where it's most likely to be - and he's in floor four, so he needs to get down several floors. Which is hard, because you don't have a pass, so how do you do that? You chat with people. He's walking the corridor with someone who is obviously going that way ... 'Hey, how you doing, haven't seen you in ages' ... talking with someone as he is going through the doors. Don't try to hide, put yourself out in the open, because no-one expects you to do that if you're an outsider.</p><p>"So he gets down two or three floors ... getting closer, when bad luck happens. He's walking the corridor, and at the other end of the corridor is the host from two hours ago, same guy. Tom is trying to walk away, but too late - he sees him, he's caught. The guy comes over: 'Hold on, how are you here, you can't possibly be here, I left you in the toilet three hours ago!' And Tom is like 'yeah, I'm lost!' 'Okay, this a security breach, I have to escort you out.'"</p><p>At this point, Tom decides there's no reason keeping up the pretense. He explains to the host that he works for a security consulting company, and he's doing an audit of the bank. "The host goes 'ohhhh, I see. You have a good day!" and goes away, and leaves him there. That's it!</p><p>"Then he gets down one more floor, actually finds the mainframe, and takes the selfie."</p><p>He stole employee passwords, got in, got access to the bank's systems - even got caught! - and still managed to get away again.</p><p>Hypponen concludes: "People are a weak link, because there's no patch. There's nothing you can do to fix that."</p><h2>Bank hacking for dummies ...</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="http://pictures.reuters.com/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult&amp;VBID=2C0FCI6QA8MP&amp;SMLS=1&amp;RW=1440&amp;RH=718&amp;RW=1440&amp;RH=718#/SearchResult&amp;VBID=2C0FCI6QA8MP&amp;SMLS=1&amp;RW=1440&amp;RH=718&amp;POPUPPN=29&amp;POPUPIID=2C0408TDT5SDH">REUTERS/Ruben Sprich</a></span></p><p class="caption">The profits from hacking a financial institution can be astronomical.</p></div><p></p></div></div>There has been a flood of news about hacks targeting financial insitutions recently. <a href="https://www.wired.com/2016/05/insane-81m-bangladesh-bank-heist-heres-know/">The national bank of Bangladesh was hit in a highly sophisticated attack</a>, with the attackers taking off with $81 million (£58 million) - and attempting to steal as much as $1 billion (£710 million).</p><p>The group has also attacked banks in Ecuador, Vietnam, and the Philippines, <a href="http://money.cnn.com/2016/05/26/technology/swift-bank-hack-philippines-lazarus/">according to investigators</a>.</p><p>Hackers are getting more ambitious, spending longer on attacks, and demonstrating greater sophistication, experts told Business Insider - and the rewards they're reaping are larger than ever.</p><p>So how <em>do</em> you hack a bank?</p><p>For starters, you need to scope the organisation out. Like Tom and his team did, you need to research employees, and work out who you are going to target. This is because you're likely to rely on human error for your initial penetration - using a phishing scam to steal an employee's password, dropping a USB stick with malware on, etc. - rather than exploiting a vulnerability in the bank's outwards-facing systems.</p><p>"It's very hard to guarantee a company will have forgotten to patch a system, or they'll have a coding error in their website application, or they'll have some other vulnerability you can exploit from the outside," says L<keyword id="6354868" type="COUNTRY" weightage="60" keywordseo="UK">uk</keyword>e Hull, UK &amp; Ireland director for Mandiant, a FireEye-owned security firm that is one of those investigating the Bangladesh bank hack.</p><p>"It's a lot easier to trust in the fact someone in that organisation is going to click a link in an email, or they're going to fall for a scam of some kind, and that's going to give you that first level of access."</p><h2>The attacker's resources will determine the nature of the attack.</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/54397539@N06/5153972000/">gordonramsaysubmissions/Flickr (CC)</a></span></p><p class="caption">When you're trying to steal tens of millions of dollars, a mole might be worthwhile.</p></div><p></p></div></div>How the employees are compromised will be dependent on the determination and sophistication of the attacker. You can buy off-the-shelf "exploit kits" for infecting employees with malware for around £1,000 ($1,400) that can - potentially - get you in, while at the higher end attacks will be far more targeted and considered.</p><p>Another option for getting in is hiring someone on the inside, if the stakes are high enough. "If you're stealing hundreds of millions of dollars, you can afford to have a mole inside the organisation planted there," said Mikko Hypponen. "That's going to pay itself back a thousandfold."</p><p>Once in, some level of technical skill will be required to move through the network undetected - with some attackers demonstrating remarkable finesse. In the case of the Bangladesh hack, the bank had a security feature that printed out every transaction on paper. "They knew the data on computers can be falsified, but if it's on paper it cannot be changed," explained Hypponen. "And they actually bypassed that," hacking the printers themselves to hide the fraudulent transactions.</p><p>Attackers are willing to spend months on attacks in pursuit of their goals, with operations acting much like traditional businesses. Jobs are sometimes advertised in advance, with clearly defined roles, Luke Hull explains. In addition to technical jobs, you've got human resources-type support roles, as well as "people behind the scenes who can handle the business end" - understanding how the bank functions, mapping out its corporate structure as the infiltrators move through it.</p><p>Successful attackers will ultimately end up with valid user accounts and an intimate knowledge of how the bank operates. At that point, what you do next depends on what your motivations are.</p><h2>Hackers target banks for cash - or intelligence.</h2><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image"><p class="source"><span>Alan Crowhurst/Getty Images</span></p><p class="caption">It's not just organised crime syndicates targeting banks - intelligence-hungry governments are also at it.</p></div><p></p></div></div>For many hacks, the end game will be turning a profit. This means, when infiltrating a bank, the goal is to gain access to its money-transfer systems to steal funds.</p><p>The attacker will attempt to send cash to an account elsewhere that they control; in the recent bank hacks, this has been via the SWIFT network, an international messaging system between banks.</p><p>The funds, once successfully exfiltrated, will be laundered - while the hacker attempts to cover their tracks to give them maximum time for the getaway, as the Bangladeshi hackers did with the printer hack.</p><p>But that's not the only reason you might want to hack a bank. Some other attacks - largely carried out by government-backed hackers - have a different aim: intelligence-gathering. Across all industries, around 45% of the attacks Mandiant detects will be nation state attacks, Hull said.</p><p>"If a nation state were to attack the bank I'm sure they'd be much more interested in things like where is the bank moving the money ... if they had their own central bank, how does it match up ... all this kind of stuff is information collection, and all this kind of stuff requires a very low footprint and very longterm access. So they're probably not going to be moving money."</p><p>In other words, if you're hacking a bank for intel, then you're not going to risk setting off alarm bells by trying to steal funds. Your end game is to sit there quietly, watching.</p><p>And this is what makes one theory about the culprits behind the Bangladesh hack so unusual.</p><h2>"This would have been the first in history"</h2><p>Code discovered in the hack has been seen before - in the devastating 2014 hack of Sony Pictures, and used against South Korean banks and media companies. In both cases, North Korean hackers have been blamed.</p><p>If North Korea is behind the bank hacks, it would be a world-first. If true, "it's a financial attack, they're trying to fix their budget," Hypponen says. "And this makes it even more unique, because we have seen thousands of nation state attacks over the last 15 years. Every single one of them - every single one - has been either espionage or sabotage. They're either stealing information, or doing stuff like Stuxnet. This would have been the first in history which is a nation state doing offensive cyber attacks to steal money."</p><p><div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_left"><div><div class="image on-image"><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-10/bangladesh-bank-heist-probe-said-to-find-three-groups-of-hackers"><p class="source"><span>NKnews</span></p><p class="caption">North Korea is one of the suspects behind the Bangladesh hack, in what could be a first-of-its-kind attack.</p></a></div><p></p></div></div>Bloomberg reports that that investigators have also found evidence of state-sponsored Pakistani hackers in Bangladesh's central bank - and it may be a <em>third</em>, as-yet unidentified organisation that was responsible for the actual theft of funds. (If correct, this would mean while North Koreans may have also breached the bank, they were presumably only there for intelligence-gathering purposes.)</p><p>Who is this third group? An unpublished report from Booz Allen Hamilton "makes the case this is Filipino-Chinese businessmen collecting money to overthrow the government of the Philippines," Mikko Hypponen told Business Insider. "The technical evidence doesn't really support all that so far as I can see, but it's perfectly possible."</p><p>The Booz Allen Hamilton report has not been released publicly, and the organisation did not respond to Business Insider's request for a copy of the report.</p><p>Whoever's behind the recent string attacks - it's likely that there are more to come. "I'm certain there are other cases, which either the banks don't know about themselves or which just haven't been made public," Hypponen said. "These attacks have targeted more banks than just these four."</p><p>And the majority of attacks against financial institutions by other groups of attacks are likely going unnoticed says Mandiant's Luke Hull. "I'd be surprised if the majority of attacks were recognised. A lot of attacks, unless you catch them right at the start, they ... move further away from malware. You start to use actual user accounts as if they were in the office, start to use their home working solutions, and eventually you use their actual accounts to move money or something. At that point it becomes more of an antifraud exercise than a technical redesign exercise."</p><h2>This is a "wakeup" call, experts say.</h2><p>The attacks on central banks mark a break from tradition.</p><p>"We have seen banks targeted by online criminals for 15 years," F-Secure's Mikko Hypponen said. "But most of the attacks - practically all of the attacks - against banks have not been against banks' own central systems. It's about the banks' <em>customers'</em> systems."</p><p>Why? "Because banks are very good at securing their own systems. They put a lot of money in there. It's kind of hard to break - it's doable, but it's very hard. As opposed to breaking a bank's customer's systems ... trivial. Of course you can't steal as much from them, but if you have a thousand victims, and you steal a thousand euros from each, that's a million euros."</p><p>Industries tend to be targeted in a cyclical basis. Businesses in one sector get hit hard, they upgrade their systems to a point where its no longer profitable for hackers to target them, and so the attackers move onto something else. "They pick an industry, beat it up, and get out before the money is spent on security," Hull said.</p><p>Hypponen said: "We saw a great wakeup call in the industrial control sector six years ago with Stuxnet ... the car industry woke up last year."</p><p>After banking, who will be next to wake up?</p><p>"I don't know, but I guess we'll find out."</p>    <div class="margin-top">        <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/switzerland-gotthard-base-longest-train-tunnel-deepest-tech-world-2016-5">Switzerland spent $12 billion to build the world's longest and deepest train tunnel </a></h3>        <div>            <div>        <div class="ooyala-video-player" data-video-autoplay="false" data-video-id="ZmbzhzMzE6R2FSJ7NMR7ButL9XnY_-VL" data-player-variable="ooyalapopvideo" id="ooyalaplayer_popvideo" style="width:1280px;height:720px"></div>        </div>        </div>            </div>

You Searched For "pakistani hacker group" and got 5 results

Top cyber espionage groups that have India in their crosshairs

Prabhjote Gill

WhatsApp chief says national security officials of US allies were among those targeted with NSO malware

Kevin Shalvey

The man of the hour: All you need to know about Ankit Fadia

Poulomi Das

Mitron repackaged app made by developers from Pakistan: Report

IANS

How to hack a bank

Rob Price

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