Police could lawfully use bulk surveillance techniques to access messages from encrypted communications platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal, following a ruling by the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), a court has heard.

  • NarrativeBear@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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.

    • Plopp@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      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.

      • hoshikarakitaridia@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        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.

      • AtHeartEngineer@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        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.

    • aodhsishaj@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      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.

      • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        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.

    • pwalker@discuss.tchncs.de
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      3 months ago

      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