from redti@lemmy.zip to privacy@lemmy.ml on 12 Nov 20:20
https://lemmy.zip/post/74912379
cross-posted from: lemmy.today/post/63197390
found this on some telegram channel:
In February 2026, an employee of Paragon Solutions published a photograph on her LinkedIn profile depicting the operation of the Graphite spyware. The post has currently been deleted.
Reut Yamen holds the position of Chief Legal Counsel and Director of Compliance at the Israeli company Paragon Solutions, which specializes in cyber-surveillance technologies. The company was founded in 2019 by a group of former employees of Israeli intelligence services — among them Ehud Schneorson, former commander of Unit 8200 (Israel’s equivalent of the U.S. National Security Agency), as well as former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
The post was first noticed by technology researcher Yurre van Bergen, who tracks the use and proliferation of spyware worldwide.
The image apparently shows a demonstration interface of the Graphite system. An operator can view messages intercepted from a surveillance target in various services, including WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Line, and TikTok.
According to the results of a large-scale investigation conducted by The Citizen Lab in 2025, in 2024 in Italy, dozens of journalists and private individuals were attacked via the WhatsApp messenger using Graphite. A “zero-click” exploit (one that does not require user interaction) was used for this purpose.
Paragon Solutions has (or previously had) contracts with U.S. government agencies, in particular the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
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threaded - newest
I’m starting to feel sceptical to anything electronic
At some level, you have to accept that there’s no panacea to the panopticon. At least, none at the retail level.
Ffs, flock cameras and facial recognition make even MeatSpace a shitshow of privacy violations.
Ultimately, the real defense against spying is irrelevance. 99.99% of people simply aren’t interesting enough to monitor in a way that matters.
And that’s the real point.
Make irrelevance desirable and notoriety risky and you’ve got a compliant people
But also make notoriety a source of revenue and irrelevance a job security risk.
You’ll get enthusiastic compliance, as evidenced by the last two years.
But you’ll also get a groundswell of nobodies who are super pissed at you. All this surveillance is ineffectual when defiance occurs at scale.
When everyone’s acting in opposition, nobody gets punished.
Those 99.99% of “uninteresting” people who make up the trillions of the Big Tech data market
You must assume that anything you communicate electronically can be traced back to you. Even if it’s encrypted, if they just hack your OS and read the messages from a screen capture they can still access it.
First avoid the major social apps. They are designed to give their companies access to your private information for advertising and selling, so of course these have lots of ways for nefarious attacks without user intervention since they aren’t likely to spend money keeping them out. Also, wouldn’t hurt to move to an OS that better isolates apps (like GrapheneOS) and avoid background services with administrative privileges like iOS or Google Services. GrapheneOS isolates Google services a bit or allows never installing them. IPhone has no real way to mitigate risk outside of the basics like encrypting your device and online data, but the admin services still have access. Not sure how easily they are hacked these days since they haven’t really been promoting privacy anymore, but have also started wanting to profit from your data. Still slightly better than google, but way less control over the device which means you’re at their mercy. I want even get started on Samsung administrative services…and I don’t know the others well.
Is this any relation to the graphite os?
I think you mean GrapheneOS, the security-hardened Android distribution. No, it is not related to the Graphite spyware, and likely reduces the user’s exposure to such attacks.
what you’re thinking of is grapheneOS not graphite the spyware
No it’s a spyware tool called Graphite.
Not related to Graphite OS, Nor Graphene OS
This is it:
stateofsurveillance.org/…/paragon-graphite-spywar…
Thanks, this is what I was wondering. Glad it’s not related to the OS.
So genuine question: if the person above didn’t reply, would you have likely kept on wondering if there was a connection between those two and if not how long do you think it would be before you looked it up? Would you have?
that’s called graphene.
Man we really just need to block all forms of trade relationships with Israel, like we do with China but even more so. and then maybe 60% of our issues just to away.
How could Putin do this?
Read: ios and android is woefully insecure. By design.
If you represent a country, you should be setting up to help your industry and citizens to escape these insecure surveilance capitalism devices.
Is there a source for this information? Do we know where the vulnerability is or how it works?
Anyone know if using Molly (the Signal fork) would be sufficient protection from this?
can’t have a secure messenger if the device itself isn’t secure