What is the NSO Group Pegasus Spyware Software? How Does Pegasus Hack Phones?
There was a flurry of news this morning about NSO Group, an Israeli tech firm, and the Pegasus spyware that produces.
Al Jazzeera has some interesting reporting and have been following the story for a while. Back in December they reported about their journalists being hacked.
“Based on this, we handed the phone to Citizen Lab, who found that the phone was hacked by spyware called Pegasus, which is developed by NSO, an Israeli company,” said Almisshal.
“This hacking was done by a so-called zero-click technique where they can access cameras and track the device. They also found that operators in the UAE and Saudi Arabia were behind this hacking.
“We tracked the spyware for six months and found that at least 36 Al Jazeera staffers were hacked. They have used some of the content they stole from the phones to blackmail journalists, by posting private photos on the internet,” he added.
via Al Jazeera
The “zero-click” technology is eye-catching.
While the Israeli-based company used to send a malicious link via SMS – which would leave evidence of hacking attempts – this time the attacks were infecting the phones without users taking any action in what is called a “zero-click” attack.
“The shift towards zero-click attacks by an industry and customers already steeped in secrecy increases the likelihood of abuse going undetected,” said the Citizen Lab report.
NSO says on its website that the technology is produced with the purpose of allowing governments “to prevent and investigate terrorism and crime to save thousands of lives around the globe”.
However, the Israel-based company has already been linked to governments exploiting the technology to spy on journalists, lawyers, human rights activists and dissidents.
via Al Jazeera
According to The Guardian:
Pegasus infections can be achieved through so-called “zero-click” attacks, which do not require any interaction from the phone’s owner in order to succeed. These will often exploit “zero-day” vulnerabilities, which are flaws or bugs in an operating system that the mobile phone’s manufacturer does not yet know about and so has not been able to fix.
via The Guardian
Pegasus, a sophisticated surveillance tool developed by the Israel company, infects the user’s smartphone and steals all the phone’s information, including every contact name and phone number, text message, email, Facebook message, everything from Skype, WhatsApp, Viber, WeChat and Telegram.
“The scale is staggering compared with anything we have seen before,” Bill Marczak, a research fellow at cyberspace research group Citizen Lab, told Al Jazeera. He noted that a previous expose had uncovered the hacking of about 1,400 numbers.
via Al Jazeera
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