• FinSpy is a commercial spyware suite produced by the Munich-based company FinFisher Gmbh. Since 2011 researchers have documented numerous cases of targeting of Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) - including activists, journalists, and dissidents with the use of FinSpy in many countries, including Bahrain, Ethiopia, UAE, and more. Because of this, Amnesty International’s Security Lab tracks FinSpy usage and development as part of our continuous monitoring of digital threats to Human Rights Defenders.• Amnesty International published a report in March 2019 describing phishing attacks targeting Egyptian human rights defenders and media and civil society organizations staff carried out by an attacker group known as “NilePhishâ€. While continuing research into this group’s activity, we discovered it has distributed samples of FinSpy for Microsoft Windows through a fake Adobe Flash Player download website. Amnesty International has not documented human rights violations by NilePhish directly linked to FinFisher products.• Through additional technical investigations into this most recent variant, Amnesty’s Security Lab also discovered, exposed online by an unknown actor, new samples of FinSpy for Windows, Android, and previously undisclosed versions for Linux and MacOS computers.• This report provides technical information on these recent FinSpy samples in order to aid the cybersecurity research community in further investigations, enable cybersecurity vendors implement protection mechanisms against these newly discovered variants, and to raise awareness among HRDs of evolving digital attack techniques.
The “PDF†file obtained from the server is a short script containing encoded binaries for Linux 32bit and 64bit. It extracts the binary for the relevant architecture in /tmp/udev2 and executes it.