hello world satanic here back with
another dose of hacking news first up
the Zuck might just owe you a bunch of
money a German court has ruled that if
your data was included in the famous
Facebook data breach of 2021 and there's
a good chance it was then Facebook owes
you €100 even Zuckerberg himself was
doxed in the breach leaking his phone
number where he lived who he's married
to and sure you could get most of that
from his Wikipedia page but this level
of data was also leaked for over 500
million other Facebook users we're
talking dates of birth email addresses
employer details locations and phone
numbers of half a billion people the
breach wasn't really the result of a
hack rather Facebook had this feature
that allowed you to search for people by
using their phone number and so I guess
it was inevitable that some enterprising
cyber criminal would write a script to
search random phone numbers on mass and
well they did enabling them to scrape
the data of 20% of Facebook's entire
user base after acquiring the megadump
it was traded privately between cyber
criminals for a couple of years before
the inevitable happened and it was
posted publicly on the now deceased
hacker Community raid forums at the time
this caused a bit of a meltdown and a
year later the Irish data protection
commission finded Facebook a couple
hundred million EUR for their privacy
violations however whilst governments
did get a nice payout the actual victims
of the breach have so far failed to get
any compensation because it just can't
be proven that the data breach LEDs to
any specific criminal activity but
that's a pretty high standard of
evidence I mean how can you prove that a
fishing email you fell for was only made
possible because your email address was
leaked by Facebook 3 years ago it's it's
impossible and now a German Court agrees
they said there doesn't have to be any
specific misuse of the data and just the
fact it was stolen is enough to Warrant
some kind of a payout the court suggests
that the level of compensation should be
€100 Which is less than the, that the
complainant in this case was after but
it's something you can check whether
your data was included in the breach
over at T been pwned but the bad news is
you've kind of got to live in Germany to
benefit from this but hopefully it sets
some kind of a precedent I mean
shouldn't you be the one to receive
compensation for your data being stolen
rather than some government agency let
me know your thoughts down
below next up the battle between
WhatsApp and NSO group just got a little
more interesting new court documents
alleged that NSO continued to use
WhatsApp exploits even whilst WhatsApp
was in the process of suing them for it
so to give you some context NSO is of
course the famous Israeli spyware
company behind Pegasus a world-class SP
at all sold to governments all around
the world which helps them hack into
terrorists and criminals phones and
sometimes journalists and human rights
activists allegedly though you won't
find that on nso's homepage Pegasus
spyware is the definition of noob
friendly according to court documents
the customer as in the government agency
only needed to enter the target devices
phone number and press install and
Pegasus would install the agent on the
device remotely without any engagement
this kind of power is possible because
NSO spends a lot of time reverse
engineering messaging apps finding V
abilities and developing exploits for
them which are then incorporated into
the Pegasus spyware platform but we've
known all about that for years what the
new court documents reveal is the
apparent I don't give a attitude
NSO had whilst they were being dragged
through the courts by one of the world's
biggest companies core documents
describe how NSO developed an exploit
called Heaven that used a WhatsApp
installation server which is just a
fancy term for a modified WhatsApp
client capable of sending malformed
messages containing the exploits giving
them the ability to hack WhatsApp users
however just a few months later WhatsApp
detected and blocks the heaven exploit
after which in 2019 WhatsApp Su ano
group because would you believe it using
WhatsApp for international cyber
Espionage doesn't really align with
their terms of service however court
documents say that even after WhatsApp
had started this legal process NSO
developed a new malware Vector called
erased seemingly named after that one
mirror from Harry Potter it's alleged
that erised gave governments the same
ability to infect WhatsApp users with a
spyware which NSO has admitted in total
was installed on between hundreds and
tens of thousands of Target devices a
pretty wide range WhatsApp eventually
blocked era said but it's not so clear
if NSO is still exploiting WhatsApp as
it's being reported that NSO Witnesses
are refusing to say whether the Spy
Weare maker developed further WhatsApp
exploits but the lawsuit continues as it
has done for the past 5 years
now for our next story law enforcement
is once again not very happy with apple
a new update in iOS 18 is making it much
harder for three-letter agencies to pull
the data off iPhones up until now it's
been relatively straightforward for
police to just seize an iPhone and then
stick it in an Evidence Locker for as
long as needed until they get around to
hooking it up to a forensics analysis
tool so they can grab the data off it
this is possible because seized iPhones
are very likely to be in what's called
an AFU State meaning that the device has
been unlocked at least once since its
last reboot in this state the phone's
decryption keys are still stored in
memory and so it's very likely that a
forensics tool usually from some Israeli
company will be able to grab them
however in the last week a document has
started circulating in law enforcement
group chats warning that iPhones sitting
around in evidence lockers are
mysteriously rebooting themselves this
has made it way harder for the feds to
read the data off them because once an
iPhone is rebooted it gets put into
what's called a bfu state and those keys
just can't be grabbed from memory
anymore this is why caller ID just won't
work until you unlock your phone because
your contacts list is still encrypted
and inaccessible until the phone is in
an AFU state it was 404 media who
initially reported on these mysterious
reboots after which security researchers
discovered that this is down to a new
undocumented feature in iOS 18 called
inactivity reboot which causes phones to
automatically reboot themselves after
being idle for a couple days putting
them into that bfu state whilst it's not
totally impossible for phones in the
state to be cracked by law enforcement
it does make it way harder since they
now have to be brute forced and this
brute forcing ability is only usually
developed months if not years after the
ability to unlock a particular phone in
its AFU state but Apple's new inactivity
reboot feature only explains half the
story here because that leaked law
enforcement documents claims that older
iPhones are also exhibiting the same
behavior so there is some suggestion
that iOS 18 devices are somehow
communicating with older iPhones in
their vicinity perhaps via Apple's find
my network instructing them to reboot in
some way in fact the law enforcement
documents actually advises other
agencies that if your AFU devices have
not been exposed to iOS 18 devices take
action to isolate those devices
now next up one of the Cyber criminals
alleged to be behind 2024's largest
string of breaches has just been
arrested in Canada Conor Riley Muka also
known as waifu has just been charged in
connection with the snowflake hacks
snowflake is a company that provides
cloud storage and analytic solutions to
some pretty large corporations and early
this year when the cyber crimal group
UNC 5537 discovered that many of these
Corporation snowflake accounts storing
huge amounts of customer data were
protected by nothing more than a basic
username and password combo they started
scouring the dark web buying up
snowflake credentials which had been
stolen from employees with infos malware
then thanks to a total lack of
multiactor authentication they were able
to Simply log into those accounts and
exultate mountains of data there was a
period early this year when it seems
every few weeks we'd hear of yet another
company falling victim to the wave of
snowflake breaches with 165 companies
AFF in a total Connor or waifu has been
charged with 10 of these hacks the
biggest of the bunch being the AT&T
breach when the call and tex records of
nearly all AT&T's customers for a
6-month period were stolen by the gang
we're talking a database that included
the phone numbers that each customer had
called or texted and for some of those
interactions even the cell site IDs was
included which could have been used to
unmask those customers IRL location AT&T
managed to negotiate a surprisingly
small Ransom of just
$370,000 in exchange for deletion of the
data but the indictment alleges that
from all their breaches wfu and his
co-conspirators in total profited 36
Bitcoin roughly $2.5 million as for how
he was caught a researcher from unit
221B who is tracking Wu and the group
claims that the guy recently made some
kind of obsc slip up which might have
leaked his identity but the researcher
didn't go into detail after which Wu
told a different researcher at 404 media
that he was starting to become worried
that he would soon be arrested and had
started destroying data and I suppose he
was right and the guy is now facing
extradition to the US