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Inside Project Raven, a Team of Former NSA Analysts Who Worked for the UAE Government

Andrew Orr ·

Project Raven was a team that included more than a dozen former U.S. intelligence operatives recruited to help the United Arab Emirates engage in surveillance of other governments, militants and human rights activists critical of the monarchy. Reuters tells the story.

The operatives utilized an arsenal of cyber tools, including a cutting-edge espionage platform known as Karma, in which Raven operatives say they hacked into the iPhones of hundreds of activists, political leaders and suspected terrorists. Details of the Karma hack were described in a separate Reuters article today.

An interesting story. We know that iOS 14.8 patched a vulnerability used by the Pegasus spyware, but I haven’t heard much about Karma.

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'SSID Stripping' Can Trick You Into Joining a Malicious Wi-Fi Network

Andrew Orr ·

Researchers have discovered a new type of network vulnerability dubbed SSID Stripping. It causes a network name to appear differently in a device’s list of networks, thus tricking people into joining a malicious network.

The SSID Stripping vulnerability affects all major software platforms – Microsoft Windows, Apple iOS and macOS, Android and Ubuntu. With SSID Stripping, it is possible to create a network name in a way that its display only shows a prefix that is similar to a legitimate network name (e.g. the corporate network name) while the actual network name includes the additional specially crafted information.

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How to Use Regular Expressions, or Regex, in Shortcuts

Andrew Orr ·

Regular expressions, or regex for short, are certain characters used as search functions. They are powerful, confusing tools. Justin Meredith wrote a guide on how to get started.

In case you don’t know, a piece of text within another piece of text is called a “string” in programming. For instance, the word ‘green’ is a string of characters from the text “I wore green pants today.”

So put another way, regex is a way to locate a string of text in a larger body of text. And because regex is written in code, you can use it to perform some pretty complex operations.

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Researchers Uncover a Phishing Kit Used by Two Criminal Gangs

Andrew Orr ·

Led by Noam Rotem, vpnMentor’s research team has discovered two separate criminal gangs using slightly altered versions of the same phishing kit to scam people across the globe.

It appears the phishing kit was being used to target people mostly living in Israel and France by two separate criminal gangs. However, we believe these two groups operate phishing websites and SMS operations based on the same phishing kit, possibly obtained from the same source. In addition, at least one of them is potentially affiliated with the OpIsrael political hacking group.