ALBAWABA - According to a Reuters report from Saturday, Apple and Google, two of the world's biggest tech companies, have sent out emergency alerts to users around the world after discovering a large-scale cyberattack on mobile phones in more than 150 countries, including several in the Middle East.
Apple said the threat was real and that users in many countries might have been affected, but they wouldn't say how many devices were affected or who was responsible. Google, on the other hand, named the source directly, saying that the breach happened because of spyware made by the Israeli cyber-intelligence company Intellexa.
Google's threat analysis team says that victims have been found in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and other Asian and Arab countries. Intellexa is already under U.S. sanctions, but it can still do business without any problems.
Links on WhatsApp that look suspicious are used to get in.
Haaretz, Inside Story, Inside Tech, and Amnesty International have all done in-depth investigations and found that the breach seems to have happened because of bad links sent to users through WhatsApp.
A human rights lawyer from the Balochistan region of Pakistan said they got one of these suspicious links from an unknown international number. It was later confirmed that the link was linked to spyware activity.
Cybersecurity experts say that the malware lets hackers get into phones without anyone knowing, giving them access to files, microphones, locations, and private messages. This is a method used by governments to spy on people.
Not the First Alert
This incident comes after earlier warnings in the past few months when more than 80 journalists in Italy and Spain were targeted with similar spyware campaigns. This raises more concerns about private surveillance technologies being used around the world without any oversight.
Cybersecurity experts say that this new attack could be one of the biggest mobile surveillance operations in the last two years, especially since it affected so many countries at once.
Apple and Google told users to update their devices right away, turn on advanced security features, and not open WhatsApp links or messages from people they don't know.
