YHK - yet another hacker news clone

An Israeli firm is sending zero-click spyware through online ads

148 points drewfax 1 hour ago 41 comments

ChrisArchitect 1 hour ago | parent

[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50103000

bilalq 1 hour ago | parent

Buried to the fifth page. Ridiculous suppression.

appreciatorBus 30 minutes ago | parent

Stories are flagged & voted on by users.

Stories about Israel generally devolve into factional fighting with no useful content.

Users flag & vote accordingly.

RIMR 21 minutes ago | parent

This isn't a good answer for why a major cybersecurity story that largely throws the idea of doing business with any Israeli company ever into jeopardy (any company could be a state malware operation in disguise) to the 5th page when it was upvoted as much as it was.

I know HN's algorithm is weird, but this story deserves to stick to the front page for more than the couple of hours the last thread lasted. I don't agree with the algorithm automatically deplatforming controversial topics.

ferguess_k 58 minutes ago | parent

My question is, why is Israel so good at this? It seems to be at least the 4th cyber power of the world, after the US, Russia and China, if not actually on par or better.

I guess it is because it has been under the threat of larger enemies from its birth, so it must leverage whatever it has to survive. And once you grow an organization and let it loose, you don't have much control over it anymore, and it grows in the wild like a flower.

Ambolia 47 minutes ago | parent

Because it's the only country allowed get away with stuff that would be an international scandal if a normal country did it.

pphysch 7 minutes ago | parent

More specifically, it can steal military and tech secrets from the USA and keep getting invited back. Total impunity.

beejiu 3 minutes ago | parent

Did we forget about Snowden?

helge9210 46 minutes ago | parent

Integrated selection pipeline spanning 15 years from age 4 up until age 18.

Lio 46 minutes ago | parent

It’s an interesting question. I would also guess that this kind of behaviour would be illegal for private companies in many countries even if you don’t do it domestically.

someotherperson 45 minutes ago | parent

Putting it amongst that cohort and suggesting it's a flower is definitely one reading I guess.

gatlin 33 minutes ago | parent

“Threat of larger enemies” yeah that’s the direction the threat goes.

appreciatorBus 32 minutes ago | parent

Because Israel is beset on all sides, geographically, digitally and conceptually, by forces hostile to western civilization who want to destroy them at the first opportunity. Being competent at cyber is useful defensively and offensively and the existential nature is highly motivating for the people working at it every day.

RunSet 29 minutes ago | parent

> Israel is beset on all sides, geographically, digitally and conceptually, by forces hostile to western civilization who want to destroy them at the first opportunity.

Could you name those forces?

cyberax 17 minutes ago | parent

Look at the map. Then read about the Yom Kippur war, Six-Day war, conflicts with Lebanon, and so on.

Israel now is the biggest power in the region, but it was not the case not long ago.

ToucanLoucan 17 minutes ago | parent

It's wild to me that if you wrote a fictional account of a vassal state that was constructed in the center of "hostile" territory, who exercised brutal violence on all it's neighbors, including strictly for the purpose of territorial acquisition, who was funded and supplied implements of war from it's super-state that vastly exceeded it's own production capabilities, which it used to win every conflict it found itself in, and who's officials regularly make the news for calling for outright genocide, everyone would call them the bad guys. Meanwhile in the real world we just call that Israel, and waive vaguely at "complicated politics."

gilrain 30 minutes ago | parent

The US, to its eternal shame, guarantees their security.

Israel is not particularly skillful: they're a little bully getting in some punches while a big bully holds back the rescuers. Ooh, tough guy!

mvelbaum 17 minutes ago | parent

Cope harder. The US guarantees the security of many nations, including many of the failed states in the Middle East. Look at Saudi Arabia, being completely helpless and begging everyone for help with the Houthis.

gilrain 11 minutes ago | parent

I partially agree: Israel is a little bully who should be extremely worried about the track record of their big bully brother.

chaosharmonic 9 minutes ago | parent

Dude, the cover we give Saudi Arabia is also shameful. And when you look at "businesses" like NSO Group, those things are even directly related.

But good on you for recognizing that we have a pattern of this kind of thing, even if you've stopped just short of noticing that it's a problem.

__MatrixMan__ 8 minutes ago | parent

That's been the status quo for decades, but between Trump convincing folks that the US won't protect them and Iran convincing folks that the US can't protect them, and Hegseth focusing more on culture war stuff rather than policy objectives it's a guarantee that's looking a bit thin.

tintor 28 minutes ago | parent

"threat of larger enemies from its birth"?

Israel is the one occupying and bullying its neighbors and spying on it "allies".

Angostura 26 minutes ago | parent

Back when I was a tech journalist, back in the 90s I visited Israel once and interviewed a number of their tech companies - admittedly most in the cyber-security space.

They ascribed a lot of the tech innovation to conscription - lots of the founders had learned a lot while in technical posts in the army and put that to use when they left.

ddq 8 minutes ago | parent

Most people have heard of the Mossad, but Unit 8200 of the IDF deserves the same notoriety. The state selects bright young techies and trains them in the absolute state-of-the-art in cybercrime. What could go wrong?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_8200

>The unit is composed primarily of 18–21 year olds. As a result of the youth of the soldiers in the unit, and the shortness of their service period, the unit relies on selecting recruits with the ability for rapid adaptation and speedy learning. Afterschool programs for 16–18 year olds, teaching computer coding and hacking skills, also serve as feeder programs for the unit. Former Unit 8200 soldiers have founded and hold top positions in many international IT companies, including in Silicon Valley.

>According to the Director of Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute in 2015, "Unit 8200 is probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world and stands on a par with the NSA in everything except scale."

logicchains 25 minutes ago | parent

>why is Israel so good at this?

The same reason around 25% of Nobel Prize winners are Jewish. Because the Ashkenazi IQ is much higher than average, due to selection pressures in the middle ages when they were banned from manual labor and so had to do well at more intellectual professions to survive (https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial... ).

deadnomore 22 minutes ago | parent

I’m going to save this joke for parties. Damn you a funny guy.

logicchains 12 minutes ago | parent

Here's a study backing it up: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial... (the lead author is from Tel Aviv University so hardly some antisemitic crackpot).

vladgur 2 minutes ago | parent

Interesting, never heard a term "Oriental" Jews. I guess it means those who were not expelled from the Middle east.

vladgur 5 minutes ago | parent

The grand parent is not wrong -- 22 to 25% of individual nobel prize winners in 20th and 21st century were of Jewish descent.

Although laureats of Asian descent have been on the sharpest upward trajector in the recent decades

Sources:

https://www.jinfo.org/Nobel_Prizes.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Asian_Nobel_laureates

hebelehubele 13 minutes ago | parent

God's chosen people!

asadm 10 minutes ago | parent

that's just "God's chosen people!" with extra words

logicchains 8 minutes ago | parent

No it's science: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-biosocial... . Unless you believe God forced the Europeans to persecute the Ashkenazi Jews in order to create selection pressure for intelligence.

tancop 17 minutes ago | parent

Multiple reasons. America gives Israel special protection for everything they do, Ashkenazi and general Jewish culture values education more than anyone outside of East Asia, and a lot of Soviet Jewish scientists had to work for the military so they came to Israel with cryptography or spy tech experience.

seatac76 14 minutes ago | parent

And also it has help, it is unlikely it acts alone. Example Stuxnet. Israel has the talent so they are a convenient and willing proxy too for getting shady shit done.

deepsun 11 minutes ago | parent

Don't forget the compounding effect. Say, one country (or city or community) decides to invest their efforts into area X (e.g. clock making in Switzerland). They do it and become better and better. As long as they keep doing that they can become #1 in the world. Regardless of any reasons "why them".

There's no reason Netherlands are better at chip lithography except that they're doing it (Dutch agriculture success can be attributed to good soils/climate/geolocation, but not chips). There's no reason Hollywood is better at filmmaking. Kinda chaos theory -- small changes to initial state leads to huge changes in the later outcomes.

aqme28 2 minutes ago | parent

Regarding the Netherlands, it doesn't hurt that TSMC happened to be cofounded by the same Dutch company that spun out ASML

kakacik 6 minutes ago | parent

This, plus all jewish folks I've ever met are naturally smart (not genetically of course, more like societal pressures/expectations/upbringing), hard working like few others, and seem to genuinely veer towards numerical jobs - banking and finance, math, applied math like security, cryptography, trading and so on. Very similar to Iranians to be fair, if US and British MI6 wouldnt be meddling in Iranian internal politics and supporting corrupt shah to steal all the oil cheaply those 2 would be together a superpower on global scale. Israel was very very lucky to not have any oil on their territories.

Plus very much present in US politics and power circles for some reason.

My boss is a prime example, every thought somehow infused with money (I work in a bank). My ex gf was exactly the same (she is a successful commodity trader). Just very, very different mindset to the core to say typical european one (I mention folks who are europeans).

nashashmi 6 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

beejiu 5 minutes ago | parent

It's the spy agencies you hear nothing of you should worry about.

pvaldes 5 minutes ago | parent

[delayed]

roscas 24 minutes ago | parent

"Researchers also recommend that users at high risk of targeting use ad blockers, disable ad tracking, and regularly reset mobile ad IDs.". Not "recommend". Everyone must use uBlock Origin or at least some type of ad blocker in every device.

Then also mandatory pi-hole on every house.

Even if you are used by Windows OS, you must use an adblocker. Even if you use Chrome. On every browser.