Using either a tactical rogue cell tower, such as the one @beckpeterson captured in this picture, or through equipment at the mobile operator's premises, Moroccan authorities monitored unencrypted traffic from Omar's phone and automatically injected redirects to exploit pages.
Suspicious of one of these redirects, @OmarRADI took a 🥷ninja screenshot of his phone while it was being redirected to the malicious domain, and showing it was connected over 4G network.
📢 If you are a Moroccan human rights defender, you check on your iPhone for records of similar redirects searching the two known domains in Settings > Safari > Advanced > Website Data, as shown in this clip we produced:
If you are on Android, you can try searching in your browsing history for the known malicious domains used in Morocco for these network injection attacks:
In the Technical Appendix, we highlight some details on forensic traces we have found on the device. In one case we noticed that the injection occurred while Omar was using his Twitter app, and from within it opened a link preview.
Other network injection attempts resulted in the creation of IndexedDB-related files on Omar's phone. While we did not manage to recover any exploit, we believe this might be symptomatic either of the vulnerability NSO Group is using, or of the exploitation technique.
After a successful exploitation, we noticed the system files CrashReporter.plist and softwareupdateservicesd.plist modified, seemingly to disable upload of crash reports to Apple and to disable automated software updates.
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