Discover-Tech, an Israeli advertising firm previously linked to the delivery of zero-click spyware, is the top bidder for Starlink ad impressions in 105 countries, according to a new report from Reuters. Researchers say it all points to a large-scale tracking effort aimed at users of SpaceX’s satellite internet service.
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, posted on X that data from TrendAI suggest the existence of a “worldwide surveillance op targeting @Starlink users.”
Discover-Tech was previously named in Citizen Lab’s October 15th report as the buyer of ordinary-looking ads that delivered Candiru spyware to devices at Al Jazeera without any user interaction. Candiru is an Israeli mercenary spyware vendor (now rebranded as Integrity Labs) that develops tools capable of silently compromising phones and computers. In 2021, the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security added Candiru to their trade restriction list, known as the Entity List, over concerns it supplied surveillance technology used against journalists, activists, and government officials.
You should assume your ISP is a hostile party, in cahoots with you goverment’s intelligence services. A fail close VPN and adblockers at network level as well as hardened and isolated VM for public content consumption should be your SOP.
Can you clarify here, are you suggesting that any internet browsing should be via VM?
Yes. Use QubesOS.
I wouldn’t touch the internet without it.
Preferably. See the Whonix approach in Qubes OS. There you can be only targeted as a class of Tor users, not as an individual. The blast radius of system compromise is limited, requiring a privilege escalation to break out of containment.
Who could have possibly seen this coming?
I really want to post this to r/IndiaTech on reddit. Few of the fellas there are simps for Starlink because a village with hundreds to a few thousands of people need it (spoiler alert: they don’t. The government owned company BSNL is already laying fibre in villages).
But I don’t have an account ughh.
It’s a shame how the Modi regime has defunded BSNL to crap, selling its assets off to Ambani, but it still keeps on chugging.
The real culprit sounds like web itself, being designed so that browsers can deliver 0-click spyware. Once that capability exists, of course baddies will use it. Surprise directed at the baddies is almost completely misplaced.
It’s your user agent. Disable JavaScript
this isn’t practical. we can disable some javascript but disabling it entirely would prevent us from using almost all websites, many of which we’re forced to by our employers, governments, etc
Submit a bug report and move on.
The real culprit is Earth itself, supporting millions of baddies by design.
Well, the web was and is being designed by humans, while the earth only recently is kinda coming under our limited influence. And we sure ain’t making good decisions on either one, lately… It’s almost as if the people making the decisions, shouldn’t have this power…
Good news, we’re working on making sure it doesn’t support us!
That’s not helpful, there are actually things we can do to mitigate the damage that bad actors can do and limit their power.
IPFS, Usenet, GNUnet for the win.
“…posted on X”
I mean, the Venn diagram of X users and Starlink users is a circle.
