The Dutch intelligence agency AVID said this week that “Victor Müller Ferreira” was only a front and a false identity for Sergey Vladimirovich Cherkasov, an alleged Russian intelligence officer belonging to the military branch of the GRU. AVID said it caught Cherkasov applying to be an intern at the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which is investigating potential war crimes in Russia’s wars against Ukraine and Georgia.
In addition to stopping Cherkasov from getting the ICC post and sending him back to Brazil, the Dutch intelligence agency also published his long and detailed cover story. The four-page story, often known as the “legend” of an undercover intelligence officer, details the history of “Ferreira’s” identity. “The threat posed by this intelligence officer is considered to be potentially very high,” AVID said in a statement.
After the release of Ferreira, more clues emerged about his life undercover. Social media accounts belonging to “Ferreira” were discovered by the Bellingcat investigative unit, as well as a blog and online CV. He also studied at Trinity College Dublin and Johns Hopkins University. Eugene Finkel, an associate professor at Johns Hopkins who says he taught Ferreira, tweeted: “Wrote him a letter. Strong, actually. Yes me. I wrote a recommendation for a GRU officer. I will never get over that fact. I hate everything about the GRU, him, this story. I’m so glad he was exposed.”
For years, it has been impossible to move WhatsApp chat backups between Android and iOS and vice versa. In August last year, WhatsApp announced that it was starting to roll out the ability for people to move their data between iPhone and Android devices. Now, this week, the Meta-owned company says backups will also work the other way, from Android to iOS.
Processors from Intel and AMD are vulnerable to a new side-channel attack called Hertzbleed. The attack could allow the theft of cryptographic keys and data, as reported by BleepingComputer and DarkReading. Hertzbleed works by exploiting a common power-saving feature in chips — called dynamic frequency scaling (DVFS) — that could allow an attacker to steal data. Frequency changes in DVFS may be related to the information processed by chips, Intel said in a blog post. However, neither Intel nor AMD seem to have plans to address the issue. However, the risk to end users appears to be low at this time. The team of researchers who discovered Hertzbleed say regular users probably shouldn’t worry.
Since Covid-19 began to spread in early 2020, technological systems have been developed to try to control its spread. In China, a system of mandatory health codes was created to monitor the health status of people – people with a red code must self-isolate, those with a green code are allowed to move freely. These health codes are linked to people’s phones. Now, according to multiple reports, people in China’s Henan province are claiming that their plans to protest have been blocked because their health code has been colored red. Several affected people claim they were not around anyone who tested positive for Covid-19 and the change was an abuse of power by officials.
Mozilla’s web browser may have struggled in recent years, but it’s still one of the most privacy-friendly browsers out there. The company said this week that Firefox is turning on its Total Cookie Protection feature by default for everyone who uses the browser. Any cookies saved on your computer will only be accessible to the website that placed them there, Mozilla explains in a blog post. “Instead of allowing trackers to connect your behavior across multiple sites, they just see behavior on individual sites,” the company says, adding that it’s “Firefox’s strongest privacy protection yet.”
In November 2021 The US has sanctioned the famous Israeli spyware firm NSO Group. The company’s Pegasus hacking tool has been used around the world to spy on journalists and activists. It emerged this week that US defense firm L3Harris is interested in buying the technology behind Pegasus, as Financial Times reports. Any purchase of the technology by a US company would potentially put it at odds with the Biden administration, which has blacklisted NSO. Talk of a potential deal, said to be in its infancy, drew criticism from the White House. “We are deeply concerned,” a senior official told The Washington Post. They said the deal could cause problems for US security and counterintelligence.
