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WhatsApp and Signal messages at risk of surveillance following EncroChat ruling, court hears | Computer Weekly
(www.computerweekly.com)
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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The headline is a little misleading. The actual ruling is that police can obtain warrants to install surveillance malware on phones when they have evidence the owner is using it to communicate about crimes.
Could malware be installed without access to the physical phone? How would this be achieved. Is it with a backdoor from the phone manufacturer or infected somehow from the sim card service provider.
Depending on circumstances it can be done remotely in different ways AFAIK using things like IMSI Catchers, malicious and sometimes invisible SMS messages, and maybe spearfishing or other methods. Or a combination of things, leveraging different weaknesses of the phone in question.
And because this could just enable government bodies to fuck around with spying, that's why usually you have to get a warrant for this kinda stuff on the grounds of probable cause.
This is much much harder though, and would risk exposing the vulnerabilities they are using, so they likely won't use these methods unless it's higher profile and involves some higher up govt entities. Your normal street crime cop shop won't be able to do this.
Likely as not, person charged with crime is in custody. Police force person to unlock phone, then police install malware and wait for comms to come in.
You'd have to be a real idiot to keep using the same phone after the police arrested you and forced you to unlock it, especially for doing crimes.
This. Even I would be too paranoid to keep using a phone (or other device for that matter) that the police confiscated before.
You're in custody, your friends don't know you're locked up. Who's the idiot?
Well, people doing crimes aren't known for their intelligence.
Can be done remotely on any mobile platform. Look up pegasus if you're interested.
Well just recently researchers discovered a campaign installing backdoors on iPhones using a chain of several 0-day expoits or in this case using also 0-click exploits, where no interaction from a user is needed. However those attack chain are so advanced that practically normal law enforcement would never be able to do it. But theoretically yes some well equiped state actors are able to infect you without noticing. If you are really intrested to see how advanced these attack are search for "project triangulation" or watch the recording from last years chaos computer conference: https://media.ccc.de/v/37c3-11859-operation_triangulation_what_you_get_when_attack_iphones_of_researchers#t=373
I think this is their point. The additional links are walled, but the assertion it sounds to me like they're making is that the ruling authorized them to hack and surveil an entire platform, rather than based on probable cause against specific individuals.