PEGASUS SYPWARE

     Pegasus spyware is undoubtedly one of the unprecedented and most powerful spyware produced ever. Once Pegasus is able to enter to your phone, you are set in to a constant monitoring surveillance-all the way to losing all control over your life. And the worst part about it is that you wouldn’t even know that it is in your phone. It has the capacity to infect billions of devices in a very short period of time, indiscriminately to android, IOS, Symbian and Blackberry operating systems. The single purpose of this spy ware is to collect information in individuals/organizations of interest. An Israeli company known by NSO group is responsible for the development of this product, prior to its first detection in 2016.

      In the early stages of its development, just like other viruses, Pegasus spyware infected devices by exploiting vulnerabilities in common apps and used spear-phishing, which tricks a target to click a link or open a document that will secretly install software in its device. As late as 2019, Pegasus has installed it-self by means of just a missed call to phone or a sent message with-out notification, both immediately deleted without a trace in which the owner of the phone is unable to have any idea if ever there were a missed call or a message.

         This latest version of Pegasus is clearly advanced that it doesn’t require an interaction of the device’s owner to install itself. All it need is vulnerability in a device to perform the vulnerability task called zero-click vulnerability, as explained above. Since this spyware can able to control the so called ‘’root or administrative privileges’’ the attacker behind this spyware can do much more than the actual owner of the device is able. For this reason, resources and materials with in this device can all be manipulated and extracted. All data from chats, SMS, contacts, emails, photos, calendar, GPS history etc. to real-time location, camera and microphone activation are compromised and are under the harvest and surveillance of this spyware.

     In my opinion, even though governments claimed to have used this spyware for the purpose of crime control and terrorist surveillances, the privacy shortcoming of this spyware has in other ways targeted many journalist and opposition politicians who are seen as threat by the governments in power. In countries like India, United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan, Mexico, Hungary and Saudi Arabia, governments who are not known to have a good record of human rights, privacy breaches by Pegasus were used to the purpose of murder, for example in the case a Washington post journalist Jamal Khashoggi and Mexican reporter Cecilio Pineda Birto. In addition, the fact that education or knowledge in device’s usage is not spared, and device’s protocols and consent of user is not at all protected, it is practically breaking all possible security apparatus, therefore is a very concerning security issue.

     As a conclusion, in today’s society of increasing dependency in technology, I think this unmatched  power of Pegasus has forever changed the landscape of communication, surveillance and  spy activities and reminded individuals to think before they potentially become its target. The worst part of this is that human right activists, journalists, politicians and key influential people will continue to be targets of authoritarian governments and this may lead to decline in the accountability and increase in human right violations.

Citations:

Birhane: Researched and compiled from above sources