The meteorological summit of the 27th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP27) is being held lately at the Egyptian hotel in Sharm el-Sheikh. But, the host country’s official app of the occasion appears to be nothing more than almost comical spyware, according to several reports.
According to security experts and attendees at the annual gathering of world government leaders, scientists and environmental activists, the app’s authorization requirements grant the local government alarming access to users’ smartphone data. Emails, photos and even the ability to locate geographical locations are among the main points that will be presented to Egypt’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, as well as gateways to the phones’ cameras, microphones and Bluetooth capabilities.
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“You can now download the official #COP27 mobile app, but you need to provide your full name, email address, cell phone number, nationality and passport number. You also want to enable location tracking,” Hossam Bahgat, head of the Egyptian Initiative for Human Rights, tweeted ahead of the summit last month, along with a screenshot of the app’s homepage featuring a photo of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. administrative and security”.
Speaking to the Guardian earlier this week, Electronic Frontier Foundation advocacy director Gennie Gebhart described Egypt’s COP27 smartphone as “a super villain of an app,” explaining that the required permissions are “unnecessary” for the app’s operation, strongly suggesting the government’s exit to monitor summit attendees.
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Since the 2011 uprising, the Egyptian government has worked to expand a vast virtual law enforcement apparatus, which it uses to monitor citizens, political activists and dissidents. The strategies come with the use of deep packet inspection, which allows the government to monitor all traffic within a network and online censorship of more than 500 websites, adding the country’s only independent source of information. Ahead of the COP27 summit, the Egyptian government oversaw a series of mass arrests in an effort to identify political activists. More than 65,000 political prisoners imprisoned.
While cybersecurity groups helping world leaders have likely known about glaring privacy flaws in Egypt’s COP27 app, the Guardian notes that it has already been downloaded at least 5,000 times through various assistants. It is easy to believe that the Egyptian government relies on such errors in judgment to be aware of perceived domestic and foreign threats. It’s a reminder like any other that you probably deserve to take a moment to strengthen your own online defenses against malicious actors.
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