Il gruppo Pro-Palestina BlackMeta (o DarkMeta) ha annunciato, nella giornata del 1 Agosto 2024, sul loro canale telegram ufficiale di aver condotto un attacco distruttivo sull’infrastruttura del gruppo NSO, incluso il dominio centrale. Assieme al sito del gruppo intelligence Israeliano anche il sito Europol ha subito lo stesso trattamento subendo un forte attacco DDoS.

Il 3 Agosto, BlackMeta ha voluto aggiornare la situazione dell’attacco dichiarando che entrambi i siti sono rimasti unreachable per almeno 24 ore. Il gruppo ha voluto precisare anche i metodi di mitigazione d’ermegenza avviato da Europol vantandosi dei loro fallimenti di fronte ai loro attacchi.

Attacchi passati di BlackMeta

DarkMeta non è nuovo ad attacchi ad assrt digitali israeliani, il tutto è iniziato nel mese di Aprile 2024 con l’attacco alla telecom Orange Israel portando a forti lag e disservizi. Nella rivendicazione hanno promesso di continuare i loro attacchi ad Israele a causa “del genocidio corrente e dei crimini di guerra commessi nella striscia di Gaza”. Più di 150 domini subirono disservizi e le API dell’azienda non furono utilizzabili in 6 stati diversi per tutta la durata dell’attacco

Le loro promesse sono state mantenute ben prima del recente attacco all’infrastruttura NSO, come a Israeli Bank ed il giornale Jerusalem Post. Il gruppo è molto influenzato dalla guerra Israelo-Palestinese e dichiarano di aver una lista di almeno 7 target come future vittime, incluso il Reattore Nucleare di Dimona.

NSO ed il suo destriero

NSO (acronimo dei 3 fondatori Niv, Shalev e Omri) è una azienda privata israeliana specializzata in soluzioni di cyber-intelligence, il gruppo accetta come clienti solo ed unicamente governi con la premessa di creare strumenti per il contrasto al crimine e terroristico. Il prodotto più famoso dell’azienda è lo spyware Pegasus, un sofisticato malware che sfrutta una vulnerabilità 0-click presenti in specifiche versioni di iOS e Android. Una volta lanciato l’exploit, Pegasus viene installato nel dispositivo della vittima permettendo di estrarre dati dalle app di messagistica più comuni, chiamate, SMS, locazione in tempo reale e molto altro con un’alta affidabilità. Per chi volesse approfondire può visionare il report di CitizenLab che furono tra i primi watchdog a scoprire ed analizzare il malware. Israele definisce Pegasus come arma necessitando di una approvazione diretta dal governo per l’uso e lo sviluppo di varianti, tra le controversie riguardanti NSO molte riguardano l’utilizzo di questo malware.

Pegasus è stato usato contro giornalisti, politici e difensori dei diritti umani creando problemi agli equilibri geopolitici portando gli USA a blacklistare non solo lo spyware ma il gruppo NSO nella sua interezza proibendo alle aziende americane a vendere le proprie tecnologie all’azienda [1].

Conclusioni

Nel Dicembre 2023, NSO ha rilasciato un rapporto sulla trasparenza dichiarando (sull’introduzione, scritta direttamente dal CEO) come l’attacco terroristico Palestinese del 7 Ottobre 2023 evidenzi la necessita di uno strumento come Pegasus e specificando cosa non fa e non è Pegasus.

Tali dichiarazioni sembrano presagire un possibile ritorno (silenzioso) dell’utlizzo dello spyware sia fuori che dentro i confini dei paesi in conflitto. Questa potrebbe essere la motivazione del gruppo DarkMeta ad aggiungere NSO alla lista dei loro target.

Il landscape GeoPolitico sta influenzando sempre di più le motivazioni di diversi gruppi (apparentemente) indipendenti portandoli a non temere obbiettivi grossi ed ambiti. Questo tipo di attacchi si posizionano nella linea grigia tra giusto e sbagliato lasciando spazio a quesiti su come giudicare i diversi soggetti coinvolti. Uno dei dilemmi da affrontare, quando la situazione di guerra in Europa e Medio Oriente si stabilizzerà, sarà giudicare se la definizione Ethical Hacking e White Hat debbano essere aggiornate o persino considerate inutili ed estremamente limitanti.

L'articolo NSO Group nel mirino! BlackMeta attacca il dominio centrale del produttore di Spyware proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Miss PDAs and UMPCs? You wouldn’t be the only one, and it’s a joy to see someone take the future into their own hands. [Icepat]’s dream is reviving UMPCs as a concept, and he’s bringing forth a pretty convincing hardware-backed argument in form of the Pocket Z project. For the hardware design, he’s hired two engineers, [Adam Nowak] and [Marcin Turek], and the 7-inch Pocket Z7 version is coming up quite nicely!

The Hackaday.io project shows an impressive gallery of inspiration devices front and center, and with these in mind, the first version of the 7-inch UMPC sets the bar high. With a 1024×600 parallel RGB (DPI) touchscreen display, an ATMega32U4-controlled keyboard, battery-ready power circuitry, and a socketed Pi Zero for brains, this device shows a promising future for the project, and we can’t wait to see how it progresses.

While it’s not a finished project just yet, this effort brings enough inspiration all around, from past device highlights to technical choices, and it’s worth visiting it just for the sentiment alone. Looking at our own posts, UMPCs are indeed resurfacing, after a decade-long hiatus – here’s a Sidekick-like UMPC with a Raspberry Pi, that even got an impressive upgrade a year later! As for PDAs, the Sharp memory LCD and Blackberry keyboard combination has birthed a good few projects recently, and, who can forget about the last decade’s introductions to the scene.

The ‘CRT Effect’ myth says that the reason why pixel art of old games looked so much better is due to the smoothing and blending effects of cathode-ray tube (CRT) displays, which were everywhere until the early 2000s. In fits of mistaken nostalgia this has led both to modern-day extreme cubism pixel art and video game ‘CRT’ filters that respectively fail to approach what pixel art was about, or why old games looked the way they did back with our NES and SNES game consoles. This is a point which [Carl Svensson] vehemently argues from a position of experience, and one which is likely shared by quite a few of our readers.

Although there is some possible color bleed and other artefacts with CRTs due to the shadow mask (or Sony’s Trinitron aperture grille), there was no extreme separation between pixels or massive bleed-over into nearby pixels to create some built-in anti-aliasing as is often claimed unless you were using a very old/cheap or dying CRT TV. Where such effects did happen was mostly in the signal being fed into the CRT, which ranged from the horrid (RF, composite) to the not-so-terrible (S-Video, component) to the sublime (SCART RGB), with RGB video (SCART or VGA) especially busting the CRT effect myth.

Where the pixel art of yester-year shines is in its careful use of dithering and anti-aliasing to work around limited color palettes and other hardware limitations. Although back in the Atari 2600 days this led to the extreme cubism which we’re seeing again in modern ‘retro pixel art’ games, yesterday’s artists worked with the hardware limitations to create stunning works of arts, which looked great on high-end CRTs connected via RGB and decent via composite on the kids’ second-hand 14″ color set with misaligned electron guns.

Ever wanted to sniff USB device communications? The usual path was buying an expensive metal box with USB connectors, using logic analyzers, or wiring devboards together and hacking some software to make them forward USB data.

Now, thanks to [ataradov]’s work, you can simply use a Pi Pico – you only need to tap the D+ and D- pins, wire them to RP2040’s GPIOs, and you can sniff communication between your computer and any low-speed (1.1 Mbps) or full-speed (12 Mbps) devices. On the RP2040 side, plug the Pico into your computer, open the virtual serial port created, and witness the USB packets streaming in – for the price of a Pico, you get an elegant USB sniffer, only a little soldering required.

[ataradov] also offers us a complete board design with a RP2040 and a USB hub on it, equipped with USB sockets that completely free us from the soldering requirement; it’s an open-source KiCad design, so you can simply order some sniffers made from your favourite fab! This project is a great learning tool, it’s as cheap and easy to make as humanly possible, and it has big potential for things like reverse-engineering old and new systems alike. Just couple this hack with another Pico doing USB device or host duty, maybe get up to date with USB reverse-engineering fundamentals, and you could make a Facedancer-like tool with ease.

Need to reach 480 Mbit/s? [ataradov] has a wonderful board for you as well, that we have covered last year – it’s well worth it if a device of yours can only do the highest speed USB2 can offer, and, it offers WireShark support. Want WireShark support and to use a Pico? Here’s a GitHub project by another hacker, [tana]. By now, merely having a Pi Pico gives you so many tools, it’s not even funny.

We thank [Julianna] for sharing this with us!

With a number of repair-friendly companies entering the scene, we have gained motivation to dig deeper into devices they build, repurpose them in ways yet unseen, and uncover their secrets. One such secret was recently discovered by [Ayeitsyaboii] on Reddit – turns out, you can use the Steam Deck mainboard as a standalone CPU board for your device, no other parts required aside from cooling.

All you need is a USB-C dock with charging input and USB/video outputs, and you’re set – it doesn’t even need a battery plugged in. In essence, a Steam Deck motherboard is a small computer module with a Ryzen CPU and a hefty GPU! Add a battery if you want it to work in UPS mode, put an SSD or even an external GPU into the M.2 port, attach WiFi antennas for wireless connectivity – there’s a wide range of projects you can build.

Each such finding brings us closer to the future of purple neon lights, where hackers spend their evenings rearranging off-the-shelf devices into gadgets yet unseen. Of course, there’s companies that explicitly want us to hack their devices in such a manner – it’s a bet that Framework made to gain a strong foothold in the hacker community, for instance. This degree of openness is becoming a welcome trend, and it feels like we’re only starting to explore everything we can build – for now, if your Framework’s or SteamDeck’s screen breaks, you always have the option to build something cool with it.

[Via Dexerto]