[ISN] Hackers Build Android Encryption Apps For Egypt

From: InfoSec News <alerts_at_private>
Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2011 03:49:30 -0600 (CST)
http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2011/02/10/hackers-build-android-encryption-apps-for-egypt/

By Andy Greenberg
The Firewall
Forbes.com
Feb. 10 2011

Cellphones may be helping to connect and organize the pro-democracy 
protesters massing in the streets of Cairo and Alexandria. But they’re 
also offering a new method for authoritarians to track those protesters 
and monitor their communications.

So one company, Whisper Systems, is releasing a new way for Egyptians to 
thwart wiretaps on their smartphones. On Thursday, it launched an 
Egypt-specific version of two applications for Android devices: 
RedPhone, an encrypted voice-over-Internet calling app, and TextSecure, 
which encrypts users’ text messages. The Egyptian versions of the apps 
are available at Whispersys.com.

“When the protests started in Egypt, we stepped up our efforts to get it 
working there,” says a well-known hacker and spokesperson for Whisper 
who goes by the name Moxie Marlinspike. “Now we’re ready to release, and 
hopefully enable some pro-democracy advocates to communicate and 
coordinate without being surveilled.”

Cellphone carriers in Egypt haven’t admitted to monitoring Egyptian 
protesters in the recent unrest or handing over their data to the 
government. But a Vodafone official in 2009 confessed that Vodafone was 
legally required to give up data on a group of Egyptian dissidents in 
2008 who had pulled down a large poster of president Hosni Mubarak. Last 
week the Vodafone said that it had been forced by the Egyptian 
government to use its network to send out propaganda text messages to 
users. And when I asked the carrier if it was giving up users’ data, it 
responded only that it had “already made made a number of statements in 
relation to the situation in Egypt facing all of the mobile operators” 
and would “not comment on national security measures.”

[...]


___________________________________________________________      
Tegatai Managed Colocation: Four Provider Blended
Tier-1 Bandwidth, Fortinet Universal Threat Management,
Natural Disaster Avoidance, Always-On Power Delivery 
Network, Cisco Switches, SAS 70 Type II Datacenter. 
Find peace of mind, Defend your Critical Infrastructure.
http://www.tegataiphoenix.com/
Received on Fri Feb 11 2011 - 01:49:30 PST

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Fri Feb 11 2011 - 01:56:46 PST