Speakers: Bill Marczak, John Scott-Railton
In August 2016, Apple issued updates to iOS and macOS that patched three zero-day vulnerabilities that were being exploited in the wild to remotely install persistent malcode on a target’s device if they tapped on a specially crafted link. We linked the vulnerabilities and malcode to US-owned, Israel-based NSO Group, a government-exclusive surveillance vendor described by one of its founders as “a complete ghost”.
Apple’s updates were the latest chapter in a yearlong investigation by Citizen Lab into a UAE-based threat actor targeting critics of the UAE at home and around the world. In this talk, we will explain how Citizen Lab discovered and tracked this threat actor, and uncovered the first publicly-reported iOS remote jailbreak used in the wild for mobile espionage. Using the NSO case, we will detail some of the tools and techniques we use to track these groups, and how they try to avoid detection and scrutiny. This investigation is Citizen Lab’s latest expose into the abuse of commercial “lawful intercept” malcode.
We will begin the presentation with our discovery and investigation of a UAE-based threat actor we call Stealth Falcon, and explain how a small error in the operators’ operational security led us to a mobile attack infrastructure consisting of hundreds of servers, which we determined was associated with NSO’s Pegasus product. We will detail the Internet scanning we undertook to enumerate this infrastructure, and some techniques we used to try and find “live” exploit links.
It was through these techniques that we identified suspicious links sent via SMS to UAE human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor. We will describe how we caused the exploit server to “fire”, and how we determined that it served us a one-click zero-day iPhone remote jailbreak to deliver NSO’s Pegasus, a powerful and sophisticated piece of government-exclusive malcode.
We will outline the functionality of the ex
