Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) tracks actors involved in information operations (IO), government backed attacks and financially motivated abuse. For years, TAG has been tracking the activities of commercial spyware vendors to protect users. Today, we actively track more than 30 vendors with varying levels of sophistication and public exposure selling exploits or surveillance capabilities to government backed actors. These vendors are enabling the proliferation of dangerous hacking tools, arming governments that would not be able to develop these capabilities in-house. While use of surveillance technologies may be legal under national or international laws, they are often found to be used by governments to target dissidents, journalists, human rights workers and opposition party politicians.In this blog, we’re sharing details about two distinct campaigns we’ve recently discovered which used various 0-day exploits against Android, iOS and Chrome and were both limited and highly targeted. The 0-day exploits were used alongside n-day exploits and took advantage of the large time gap between the fix release and when it was fully deployed on end-user devices. Our findings underscore the extent to which commercial surveillance vendors have proliferated capabilities historically only used by governments with the technical expertise to develop and operationalize exploits.
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Friday, November 15, 2024
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