The Financial Times reports on an incident in which spying software was found on Blackberry mobile phones in the United Arab Emirates:
In the UAE incident, a consumer investigating why his BlackBerry battery kept draining looked into the code that state telecoms operator Etisalat had just recommended for installation. He turned up a file called Interceptor, which other researchers identified as a tool for eavesdropping. BlackBerry maker Research in Motion disavowed the program, which it said originated with SS8...
SS8 is based in Silicon Valley, backed by top-tier venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and largely serves law enforcement agencies.
The company, more than 15 years old, is a solid part of a growing industrial-surveillance complex that weaves together innovation in monitoring, new government cyber-security initiatives and rapid expansion in connectivity.
Which raises the questions of who was behing this, why the UAE was targetted for this operation, and what sort of information was it supposed to glean from the Blackberry users there?
I am surprised from the stupidity of this US firm giving its name in its software code which was so easy to read by users, which actually violates the fundamnetal rule of interception that it should not be detected by the target user. Very strange.
Posted by: Ahmad | September 26, 2009 at 04:51 AM