An advanced hacking campaign that previously witnessed security flaws in Android, Windows and iOS devices is actually the work of ‘Western government officials’ conducting a ‘counter-terrorism operation,’ said a new report from MIT Technology Review.
The campaign in question, which has got more and more attention of the media in recent weeks, was the first written about in January by Google’s Project Zero research team. At the time, that was all that was publicly known someone had done some very tricky things: a ‘highly advanced’ group, probably staffed by ‘teams of experts’, was responsible for targeting numerous zero-day vulnerabilities (the total would later turn out to be 11) in various prominent operating systems, researchers wrote.
This hacking campaign, which eventually took about nine months, made use of the so-called “Watering hole” method—In which a threat actor injects malicious code into a website to effectively “booby trap” it (site visitors will then become infected with malware, allowing the hacker to target and escalate the compromise of specific targets).
Of course, from all these descriptions, signs pointed to the involvement of some sort of high-ranking national hackers – although few would suspect that the culprits were in fact our friends! Nevertheless, that appears to be the case. It is unclear which government is actually responsible for the attacks, who its targets were, or what the so-called “counterterrorism” operation involved all of this. MIT has not disclosed how they obtained this information.
One thing is certain: Google’s discovery and subsequent disclosure of the exploits (as well as the company’s decision to patch the vulnerabilities) has apparently derailed every government operation. MIT writes that, by going public, the tech company effectively shut down a “ live counterterrorism ” cyber mission, adding that it is “ not clear if Google informed government officials in advance that they would publish and stop the attacks. ” This apparently has “caused internal divisions within Google and raised questions within the intelligence communities of the United States and its allies.”
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There are, of course, a lot of questions here. First, which government did this? What was the “terror” threat they were investigating? Which websites have been used in the pursuit of said terrorists? Given the sensitive political nature of these types of operations, we are unlikely to get answers to those questions – at least not right away. But since so little information is available, it’s also quite difficult to understand whether Project Zero was justified in running the operation or not, or what was even going on here.
Google apparently knows who the hackers are, and MIT reports that the incident has sparked a discussion at the company about whether counter-terrorism operations like this should be considered ‘off limits’ to disclosure, or whether it was well within their reach to disclose the vulnerabilities to’ protect users and make the internet safer. “