Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Government Spyware Vendor Left Customer, Victim Data Online for Everyone to See (vice.com)
90 points by mzs on Oct 25, 2018 | hide | past | favorite | 13 comments



https://youtu.be/mT7q3Qqzlos

>Wolf Intelligence, a Germany-based spyware company that made headlines for sending a bodyguard to Mauritania and prompting an international incident after the local government detained the bodyguard as collateral for a deal went wrong, left a trove of its own data exposed online. The leak exposed 20 gigabytes of data, including recordings of meetings with customers, a scan of a passport belonging to the company’s founder, scans of the founder’s credit cards, and surveillance targets’ data, according to researchers.

>“Maybe they were thinking that the server was secure, I don't know, but it was definitely stupid,” Kruse said. “Everything was just floating around on the internet. That's why I thought this story was too good to be true.”

>“It’s very shitty and it’s just copy paste from open source projects,” …


> detained the bodyguard as collateral for a deal went wrong

As a non-native English speaker, I'm confused whether this should have been "deal gone wrong" or "deal that went wrong", or whether it's a garden path sentence that I'm just unable to parse correctly.


I'm a native speaker. I think it should be "deal gone wrong" (or "a deal that went wrong" would work too).

FWIW.

I will add that I think they were trying to make "deal gone wrong" past tense -- or even more past tense, since gone is already past tense. I think they were trying to indicate it was a prior event within the story line, not just prior event in relation to people reading it now.


I see this kind of thing all the time, "even" in the NYT and similar first tier news sources.

I assume that everything these days is written in one pass, and no one pays for copy editors anymore. It also wouldn't surprise me if "words per month," based on how fast a professional is expect to be able to type, were part of annual reviews, in keeping with the general corporate trend of abandoning hard, personal, contextual reviews in favor of easy, no personal responsibility "metrics."

But that's all a guess, I'm not in the industry. All I can say for sure is I see it all the time.

"It passed spell check." ... "Ship it."


I'm actually a freelance writer and blogger. Everything I have read indicates that real wages are down industry-wide. Good writers used to get paid enough to spends weeks or months on a single article. Now, they need to shovel it out the door as fast as they can to keep themselves fed.

And, yeah, passing spell check leaves much to be desired. That isn't enough to insure it is excellent writing.

I'm still wondering if I can ever develop an internet presence and Patreon support (etc) with middle class or better pay for my brilliance. So far, I still make peanuts, though there are confounding factors as to why, so I haven't outright given up...yet.


If you look at the grammar rules, "gone" is a past participle and should always be preceded by an auxiliary verb. "Went" is the correct choice, though "gone" is probably more common.


Maybe it done went gone wrong?

;)


I think Doreen's correct. "deal gone wrong" is just more idiomatic (you could probably say it's short for "[the] deal [in question is a deal] that has gone wrong")


> They also found data belonging to several victims in countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. One of the victims, they said, is a human rights defender.

How doesn't this violate any arms control regulations?

Is there really no law on the books in the U.S., U.K. or EU criminalizing this? (Alternatively, do we need to press for new legislation or tighter enforcement?)


They are presumably authorized to sell to foreign governments, and those are allies that we have no issue selling weaponry to. Humans rights abuses are only really a problem when you're and enemy to the US, we'd need a drastic shift in foreign policy to change this.


These companies make a large fraction of their money selling the spyware to oppressive regimes.

I don't think it's illegal and it would be hard to write laws not easily circumventable sadly.


Both the UK and US happily sell arms to Saudi knowing that they will be used for human rights violations. It's a major policy problem.


Shaming a criminal is useless, the relevant German government officials have to take the blame and the consequences.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: