A publication by Google comes to remind us that in Greece surveillances are good. The company he says:
“To protect our users, Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG) systematically searches for 0day vulnerabilities that are exploited across the web. In 2021, we reported nine 0days affecting Chrome, Android, Apple, and Microsoft, leading to patches to protect users from these attacks.
This post is a follow-up to our July 2021 post on four 0day vulnerabilities we discovered in 2021 and details campaigns targeting Android users with five distinct vulnerabilities:
- CVE-2021-37973, CVE-2021-37976, CVE-2021-38000, CVE-2021-38003 in Chrome
- CVE-2021-1048 on Android
We assess with high confidence that these exploits were packaged by a single commercial surveillance company, Cytrox, and sold to different government-backed actors who used them in at least three campaigns listed below. Based on CitizenLab's findings, we estimate that the government-backed entities that purchased these exploits are likely operating in (at least) Egypt, Armenia, Greece, Madagascar, Ivory Coast, Serbia, Spain, and Indonesia.
Our findings highlight the extent to which commercial surveillance malware vendors have multiplied capabilities used by governments.
Seven of the nine 0day TAGs discovered in 2021 fall into this category: they were developed by commercial providers, sold and used by government-backed entities.
TAG closely monitors more than 30 vendors of varying levels of sophistication and public exposure that sell exploits or surveillance capabilities to government-backed agencies.