Saudis and UAE ‘using spyware to target phones of Al-jazeera reporters’
Dozens of journalists at Qatari state-owned media company-al-jazeera have been targeted by advanced spyware in an attack likely linked to the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, a cybersecurity watchdog has warned.
Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto said it traced malware that infected the personal phones of 36 journalists, producers, anchors and executives at Al-jazeera back to the Israel-based NSO Group, which has been widely condemned for selling spyware to repressive governments.
Most unnerving to the investigators was that imessages were infecting targeted mobile phones without the users taking any action - what is known as a zero-click vulnerability.
Through push notifications alone, the malware instructed the phones to upload their content to servers linked to the NSO Group, Citizen Lab said, turning journalists' iphones into powerful surveillance tools without even lu ring users to click on suspicious links or threatening texts.
The coordinated attacks on Al-jazeera, which Citizen Lab described as the largest concentration of phone hacks targeting a single organisation, occurred in July, just weeks before the Trump administration announced the normalisation of ties between Israel and the UAE, the arch-rival to Qatar. The breakthrough deal made public what had been a long-secret alliance.
Analysts say normalisation likely will lead to stronger cooperation in digital surveillance between Israel and Persian Gulf sheikhdoms.
Apple said it was aware of the Citizen Lab report and said the latest version of its mobile operating system, IOS 14, "delivered new protections against these kinds of attacks".
It sought to reassure users that NSO does not target the average iPhone owner, but rather sells its software to foreign governments to target a limited group. Apple said it had not been able to inde - pendently verify Citizen Lab's analysis.
Citizen Lab, which has been tracking N SO spyware for four years, tied the attacks "with medium confidence" to the Emirati and Saudi governments, based on their past targeting of dissidents at home and abroad with the same spyware. The two countries are embroiled in a bitter geopolitical dispute with Qatar in which hacking and cyber surveillance have increasingly become favoured tools.
In 2017, the two Gulf nations and their allies imposed a blockade on Qatar over its alleged support for extremist groups, a charge Doha denies.
The UAE and Saudi Arabia served the tiny country with a list of demands, among them shutting down its influential Arabic-language TV network, which the UAE and Saudi Arabia see as promoting a political agenda at odds with their own. The feud continues to fester, although officials recently have indicated a resolution may be within reach.
Emirati and Saudi authorities did not respond to requests for comment.
The move comes as China's government criticised President Donald Trump's suggestion, without any supporting evidence, that Chinese hackers might be behind a cyber espionage campaign against the United States.