By Eric Auchard FRANKFURT (Reuters) – Lebanon’s intelligence service may have turned the smartphones of thousands of targeted individuals into cyber-spying machines in one of the first known examples of large-scale state hacking of phones rather than computers, researchers say. Lebanon’s General Directorate of General Security (GDGS) has run more than 10 campaigns since at least 2012 aimed mainly at Android phone users in at least 21 countries, according to a report by mobile security firm Lookout and digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF).
The cyber attacks, which seized control of Android smartphones, allowed the hackers to turn them into victim-monitoring devices and steal any data from them undetected, the researchers said on Thursday. No evidence was found that Apple phone users were targeted, something that may simply reflect the popularity of Android in the Middle East. The state-backed hackers, dubbed “Dark Caracal” by the report’s authors – after a wild cat native to the Middle East – used phishing attacks and other tricks to lure victims into downloading fake versions of encrypted messaging apps, giving the attackers full control over the devices of unwitting users. Michael Flossman, the group’s lead security researcher, told Reuters that EFF and Lookout took advantage of the Lebanon cyber spying group’s failure to secure their own command and control servers, creating an opening to connect them back to the GDGS. “Looking at the servers, who had registered it when, in conjunction with being able to identify the stolen content of victims: That gave us a pretty good indication of how long they had been operating,” Flossman said in a phone interview.
Dark Caracal has focused their attacks on government officials, military targets, utilities, financial institutions, manufacturing companies, and defense contractors, according to the report. The researchers found technical evidence linking servers used to control the attacks to a GDGS office in Beirut by locating wi-fi networks and internet protocol address in or near the building. They cannot say for sure whether the evidence proves GDGS is responsible or is the work of a rogue employee. The malware, once installed, could do things like remotely take photos with front or back camera and silently activate the phone’s microphone to record conservations, researchers said. Responding to a question from Reuters about the claims made in the report, Major General Abbas Ibrahim, director general of GDGS, said he wanted to see the report before commenting on its contents. He added: “General Security does not have these type of capabilities. We wish we had these capabilities.” Ibrahim was speaking ahead of the report’s publication.
FLYING BENEATH THE RADAR
The EFF/Lookout team said they uncovered spy tools and a massive trove of hundreds of gigabytes of data stolen from the phones of thousands of victims that included text messages, contacts, encrypted conversations, documents, audio and photos. Targets were located mainly in Lebanon and the surrounding region, including Syria and Saudi Arabia, but not Iran or Israel, two frequent targets of government cyber spy attacks. Victims also lived in five European countries, Russia, the United States, China, Vietnam and South Korea, researchers said. The researchers notified Google , the developer of the Android operating system, late in 2017. Google worked closely with the researchers to identify the apps associated with this attack, none of which were available on the Google Play Store for Android phone users, a company spokesman said. Google Play Protect, the internet company’s unified security system that runs on many Android smartphones, has been updated to protect users from these malicious apps and is in the process of removing them from any affected phones, the spokesman said.
The attackers borrowed code to create their own malicious software from developer sites, while relying heavily on social engineering to trick people to click on links that sent them to a site called SecureAndroid, a fake Android app store. There, users were encouraged to download fake, but fully functioning versions of encrypted messaging apps and privacy tools including WhatsApp, Viber and Signal, that Flossman said promised victims secure software “better than the original”. Lookout found links between the Lebanon-linked attacks and ones tied to the Kazakh government in Central Asia in 2016 in a report called “Operation Manual” by EFF and other experts. The two research groups agreed to team up and now believe the Kazakh group was a customer of the Lebanon-based hackers. (Reporting by Eric Auchard in Frankfurt with additional reporting by Laila Bassam in Beirut; Editing by Mark Heinrich)
by – Margi Murphy-telegraph.co.uk/– A major hacking operation to snoop on government and military officials in 21 countries has been traced back to Lebanon’s security headquarters after bungling spies accidentally uploaded the files to the internet and left them online. The surveillance campaign, dubbed Dark Caracal, retrieved call logs, audio recordings, WhatsApp messages, location information and browsing history of thousands of victims’ smartphones across North Africa, Europe, the Middle East and North America, according to a report published Thursday. The report by a mobile security firm Lookout and digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation claimed suspected test devices – a set of phones that appear to have been configured to roadtest the spyware – all seemed to have connected to a WiFi network active at the site of Lebanon’s security headquarters.
The “prolific” hacking arsenal was only discovered after Lebanese spies published a gigabyte of stolen data on the internet. “It’s almost like thieves robbed the bank and forgot to lock the door where they stashed the money,” Mike Murray, head of intelligence at Lookout, told Associated Press. By sifting through the stolen information, security experts were able to deduce that victims included members of the military, government officials, medical practitioners, education professionals and academics from a range countries including Germany, Italy, Russia, South Korea, the US and Syria. British officials appear not to have been affected. The report reveals how spies used a network of spoof websites and malicious smartphone apps masquerading as WhatsApp and Telegram to steal passwords and eavesdrop on conversations while capturing at least 486,000 text messages. The tranche of data spanned a huge variety of themes, from photographs from Syrian battlefields to details of children’s birthday parties.
Victims were also targeted through Facebook groups and WhatsApp messages that were booby-trapped with malicious software. Once downloaded, that software captured smartphone data and sent it back servers owned by the Lebanese General Directorate of General Security (GDGS) in Beirut, it added. The secretive GDGS is known for its work gathering intelligence for national security purposes and for its offensive cyber capabilities. It is unclear how long Dark Caracal had been in action, but the report suggested that this was not a one-of-a-kind event and that other governments likely had access to similar tools. Discoveries of state-sponsored cyberespionage campaigns have become more common as countries in the Middle East and Asia attempt to match the digital prowess of the United States, China and Russia.
