NSO Group software: Pegasus
NSO Group software can record your calls, copy your messages and secretly film you :eek:
C/P
July 22, 2021 by David Ruiz
Malwarebytes Labs
Pegasus spyware has been here for years. We must stop ignoring it.
On July 18, a group of 17 newspaper and media organizations—aided by Amnesty International’s Security Lab and the research group Citizen Lab—revealed that one of the world’s most advanced and viciously invasive spyware tools had been used to hack, or attempt to hack, into 37 mobile phones owned by human rights activists, journalists, political dissidents, and business executives.
The spyware, called Pegasus and developed by the Israeli company NSO Group, is reportedly instrumental to several governments’ oppressive surveillance campaigns against their own citizens and residents, and, while NSO Group has repeatedly denied allegations that it complicitly sells Pegasus to human right abusers, it is difficult to reconcile exactly how the zero-click spyware program—which non-consensually and invisibly steals emails, text messages, photos, videos, locations, passwords, and social media activity—is at the same time a tool that can, in its very use, respect the rights of those around the world to speak freely, associate safely, and live privately.
Pegasus is spyware, and spyware is not made to respect privacy.
It erodes it.
Code:
https://blog.malwarebytes.com/privacy-2/2021/07/pegasus-spyware-has-been-here-for-years-we-must-stop-ignoring-it/
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C/P
The Gaurdian.
It is the name for perhaps the most powerful piece of spyware ever developed – certainly by a private company. Once it has wormed its way on to your phone, without you noticing, it can turn it into a 24-hour surveillance device. It can copy messages you send or receive, harvest your photos and record your calls. It might secretly film you through your phone’s camera, or activate the microphone to record your conversations. It can potentially pinpoint where you are, where you’ve been, and who you’ve met.
Pegasus is the hacking software – or spyware – that is developed, marketed and licensed to governments around the world by the Israeli company NSO Group. It has the capability to infect billions of phones running either iOS or Android operating systems.
The earliest version of Pegasus discovered, which was captured by researchers in 2016, infected phones through what is called spear-phishing – text messages or emails that trick a target into clicking on a malicious link.
Since then, however, NSO’s attack capabilities have become more advanced. 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.
In 2019 WhatsApp revealed that NSO’s software had been used to send malware to more than 1,400 phones by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability. Simply by placing a WhatsApp call to a target device, malicious Pegasus code could be installed on the phone, even if the target never answered the call. More recently NSO has begun exploiting vulnerabilities in Apple’s iMessage software, giving it backdoor access to hundreds of millions of iPhones. Apple says it is continually updating its software to prevent such attacks.
Technical understanding of Pegasus, and how to find the evidential breadcrumbs it leaves on a phone after a successful infection, has been improved by research conducted by Claudio Guarnieri, who runs Amnesty International’s Berlin-based Security Lab.
“Things are becoming a lot more complicated for the targets to notice,” said Guarnieri, who explained that NSO clients had largely abandoned suspicious SMS messages for more subtle zero-click attacks.
For companies such as NSO, exploiting software that is either installed on devices by default, such as iMessage, or is very widely used, such as WhatsApp, is especially attractive, because it dramatically increases the number of mobile phones Pegasus can successfully attack.
As the technical partner of the Pegasus project, an international consortium of media organizations including the Guardian, Amnesty’s lab has discovered traces of successful attacks by Pegasus customers on iPhones running up-to-date versions of Apple’s iOS. The attacks were carried out as recently as July 2021.
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disclaimer:
One of the above C/Ps is from The Guardian.
I personally do not trust The Guardian as my news source. But they do seem to tell this story, as far as I can tell , with truth and unbias.
Glen Greenwald was the founder and CEO of that paper 'the guardian' until a few of years ago when he saw how corrupt it had become and is when he stepped down from the CEO position and from the paper completely.
Greenwald for those that do not know, was the guy that brought out the Edward Snowden exposé.
