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India's Contact Tracing App Is All But Mandatory. So This Programmer Hacked It So That He Always Appears Safe.

A software engineer from Bangalore was worried about being forced to download Aarogya Setu. So he ripped its guts out.

For days, Jay, a software engineer in Bangalore, watched with mounting alarm as people in India were forced to install the government’s coronavirus contact tracing app. Then, he rolled up his sleeves and ripped its guts out.

“I didn’t like the fact that installing this app is slowly becoming mandatory in India,” said Jay, who requested a pseudonym to speak freely. “So I kept thinking of what I could personally do to avoid putting it on my phone.”

Jay started work at 9 a.m. on a Saturday. He chopped away at the app’s code to bypass the registration page that required people to sign up with their cellphone numbers. More pruning let him bypass a page that requested personal information like name, age, gender, travel history, and COVID-19 symptoms. Then, he carved away the permissions that he viewed as invasive: those requiring access to the phone’s Bluetooth and GPS at all times

By 1 p.m., the app had become a harmless shell, collecting no data but still flashing a green badge declaring that the user was at low risk of infection.

“That was my goal,” said Jay. “I succeeded. You can show the green badge to anyone if they ask to check your phone and they won’t be able to tell.”

👉🏼 Read more:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/india-aarogya-setu-hacked

#hacked #india #coronavirus #tracing #app
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
EU-funded COVID-19 app ‘listens to voices and coughs’

A recently launched EU-funded mobile application records users’ breathing and coughing to diagnose cases of COVID-19, scientists involved in the project have said.

The initiative, which has been developed by researchers at Cambridge University and partially funded by the European Research Council through Project EAR, aims to build up a large, crowdsourced dataset in order to develop machine learning algorithms to be used in automatic disease detection.

It will collect demographic and medical information from users, in addition to “spoken voice samples, breathing and coughing samples through the phone’s microphone.”

In an attempt to allay privacy fears, researchers say that the app will collect ‘one coarse grain location sample’ but that it would not track users, only recording location data once when are actively using the software.

“The data will be stored on University servers and be used solely for research purposes,” the university added.

“There are very few large datasets of respiratory sounds, so to make better algorithms that could be used for early detection, we need as many samples from as many participants as we can get,” said Professor Cecilia Mascolo from Cambridge’s Department of Computer Science and Technology, the lead team on the app.

“Even if we don’t get many positive cases of coronavirus, we could find links with other health conditions.”

👉🏼 Read more:
https://www.euractiv.com/section/digital/news/eu-funded-covid-19-app-listens-to-voices-and-coughs/

#coronavirus #eu #tracing #tracking #app #privacy #surveillance
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
U.S. Secret Service: “Massive Fraud” Against State Unemployment Insurance Programs

A well-organized Nigerian crime ring is exploiting the COVID-19 crisis by committing large-scale fraud against multiple state unemployment insurance programs, with potential losses in the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to a new alert issued by the U.S. Secret Service.

A memo seen by KrebsOnSecurity that the Secret Service circulated to field offices around the United States on Thursday says the ring has been filing unemployment claims in different states using Social Security numbers and other personally identifiable information (PII) belonging to identity theft victims, and that “a substantial amount of the fraudulent benefits submitted have used PII from first responders, government personnel and school employees.”

“It is assumed the fraud ring behind this possesses a substantial PII database to submit the volume of applications observed thus far,” the Secret Service warned. “The primary state targeted so far is Washington, although there is also evidence of attacks in North Carolina, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Oklahoma, Wyoming and Florida.”

The Secret Service said the fraud network is believed to consist of hundred of “mules,” a term used to describe willing or unwitting individuals who are recruited to help launder the proceeds of fraudulent financial transactions.

“In the state of Washington, individuals residing out-of-state are receiving multiple ACH deposits from the State of Washington Unemployment Benefits Program, all in different individuals’ names with no connection to the account holder,” the notice continues.

👉🏼 Read more:
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/05/u-s-secret-service-massive-fraud-against-state-unemployment-insurance-programs/

#USA #SecretService #alert #nigerian #fraud #coronavirus
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_DE
📡@cRyPtHoN_INFOSEC_EN
📡@BlackBox_Archiv
CoraLibre android sdk

[Message forwarded from Gramá]

Governments are starting to roll out Coronavirus-tracing apps based on the Apple-Google developed Exposure Notification API.
Google has implemented the API in their Google Services, which means that if you don't use them, you cannot use the Coronavirus Tracing APP.
I am a health specialist and I do care about privacy, I have no Google Services on any of my or my family's phones. But I do care about health and I know the importance that tracing infections have for the control of epidemics. That's why I'm fighting for doing this in the most possible open way, using as much Open Source software as possible, and I strongly belive this can be done.

Unfortunately until now all the biggest, government-funded, projects, do not address this issue, simply relying on the use of the API implementation in Google Play Services. But we have a great, well known, Android developer which started an project to develop an Open Source SDK that would be compatible with such systems and would allow us to have a Coronavirus Tracing APP that would be independent from Google Play Services.

This is the link to the project: https://github.com/theScrabi/CoraLibre-android-sdk .

Please spread the word among other developers, to have as much people as possible working on it. I'm not a developer unfortunately, so I cannot help with that. But I am a doctor and I strongly believe on the importance of this kind of tracing tools for epidemics control.


#CoraLibre #sdk #coronavirus #covid #tracing #tracking #bigbrother
Me on COVID-19 Contact Tracing Apps
by Bruce Schneier

"My problem with contact tracing apps is that they have absolutely no value,"
"I'm not even talking about the privacy concerns, I mean the efficacy. Does anybody think this will do something useful? ... This is just something governments want to do for the hell of it. To me, it's just techies doing techie things because they don't know what else to do."

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/05/me_on_covad-19_.html

Spanish translation:
https://wordsbridge.co.uk/aplicaciones-de-contactos-para-detener-la-covid-19


#coronavirus #covid #tracing #tracking #bigbrother
Novel molecule shows promising results against COVID-19
Cuban scientist reports that, in a small study, the survival rate for patients in serious and critical condition treated with CIGB-258 was 81%.

Committed to the battle against COVID-19 from the outset of the pandemic, the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) made available to the national health system not only its capacity to produce Recombinant Alpha 2b Human Interferon, but also analyzed, and submitted for the consideration of Cuban medical specialists, research linked to the development of new molecules, which was taking place in this scientific institution affiliated with the BioCubaFarma state enterprise group.

One of the examples, widely disseminated in the media in recent weeks, is the medication CIGB-258, with verified results in clinical trials suggesting that it could have a positive impact in treating COVID-19 patients at a certain stage of the disease.

This should be headline news, but none of the major international media has reported on this yet. Really makes you think.

#coronavirus #covid19 #cuba #censorship
http://en.granma.cu/cuba/2020-05-26/novel-molecule-shows-promising-results-against-covid-19