So what’s Pegasus?
Pegasus is a cyber arms tool developed by the Israeli firm NSO Group for governments and other law bodies for counter terrorism and “public safety”. The capabilities this tool possesses is immense, to say the least. From what is known to the public about what it can do, it seems that it can infiltrate any Android and iPhone, even if it is fully patched, thanks to undisclosed 0-day hacks (these are exploits which are discovered but not disclosed to the right entity to fix it, either for the sake of selling the exploit or in this case, to use for themselves). NSO Group has been selling this technology since 2010, but why is it suddenly in the news now?
The Pegasus Project was led by Forbidden Stories, an organization of journalists that works on stories after the original reporters have been silenced in some way, aided by the Amnesty International’s Security Lab used a list of about 50,000 phone numbers tagged “of interest” by NSO Group’s various clients to link the numbers back to their owners and did a thorough forensic analysis on the devices. Several of these devices had traces of the spyware. All these belonged to various journalists and human rights activists including several others. These are supposed to be strictly off-limits according to the standard NSO supposedly holds its clients to. What’s even worse is according to the NSO, usage on a particular phone cannot be tracked back to the entity which did it (but somehow it says there is transparency?)
