Altamides – The New Spyware that Can Infiltrate Your Phone Without a Trace

​We’ve long reported on Pegasus, the prolific spyware that allows attackers to access the calls, texts, emails, and images on a target’s smartphone. Worse, Pegasus can turn on a phone’s camera and microphone, transforming it into a 24/7 spying device that the victim helpfully takes from place to place.

• This technology was used by Saudi intelligence to track the soon-to-be murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi, helped cartels in Mexico to target journalists for assassination, and was implicated in political spying scandals from India to Spain.

 

• One of the most insidious aspects of Pegasus is that it is “zero-click” malware, meaning it can be remotely installed on a phone and the user doesn’t have to fall for a phishing scam or commit some other act of poor digital hygiene.

But Pegasus has a flaw – digitally savvy victims may be tipped off by a phone’s unusually high data usage, overheating, quick battery drain, and unexpected restarts. If you’re suspicious that Pegasus has been planted in your smartphone, you can scan for it via the Mobile Verification Toolkit developed by Amnesty International’s Security Lab.

Unfortunately, evolution works on spyware as it did on dinosaurs, creating new predators with enhanced stealth and devastating lethality.

Enter First Wap’s Altamides. Based in Jakarta, Indonesia, First Wap’s technology can do what Pegasus does, but without installing malware or leaving digital traces. It tracks people, Mother Jones reports, by exploiting archaic telephonic networks designed without security in mind. It can track users’ movements, listen in on their calls, and extract their text messages.
Recent versions can even penetrate encrypted messaging apps.

• Victims of such surveillance reportedly include Blackwater founder Erik Prince, Google engineers, the actor Jared Leto, and the wife of former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Mother Jones also found “hundreds of people with no public profile swept up in the dragnet; a softball coach in Hawaii, a restaurateur in Connecticut, an event planner based in Chicago.”

Who has purchased this surveillance weapon?

Lighthouse Reports, a coalition of media organizations, performed a sophisticated sting operation in which a journalist posed at a Prague sales conference as a shady buyer for an African mining concession. The journalist said he was looking for a way to identify, profile, and track environmental activists.

The salesman replied: “If you are holding an Austrian passport, like me, I am not even allowed to know about the project, because otherwise I can go to prison.”

The salesman, who (irony alert) was secretly videotaped by the journalist, added: “So that’s why such a deal, for example, we make it through Jakarta, with the signature coming from our Indian general manager.”

When the undercover journalist came back for another meeting, he elicited on tape senior First Wap executives discussing workarounds through Niger-to-Indonesia bank transfers to sell its technology to individuals under international sanctions.

Click below for a short film about this undercover sting.

​U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) told Mother Jones that this story only underscores the extent to which the U.S. government and telecoms have failed to make patches to “the glaring weaknesses in our phone system, which the government and phone companies have failed dismally to address.”

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