What is Pegasus ? – Burning Issues – Free PDF Download

pegasus

• At the heart of the alleged phone-tapping scandal in India is Pegasus, the malicious software created by the  Israeli company NSO Group.
• According to an expose by a global consortium of  media publications, phones of two serving union ministers, three opposition leaders, one constitutional authority,   current and former heads of security organisations, administer ators and 40 senior journalists and activists from India were      allegedly bugged using the Israel spy software Pegasus and  put on surveillance.

What is it?

• Pegasus is a type of malicious software or malware classified as a spyware.
• Spyware such as Pegasus is designed to     gain access to your device, without your knowledge, and  gather personal information and relay it back to    whoever it is that is using the software to spy on you.
• According to this report, Pegasus is the      “the ultimate spyware for iOS and Android”, and has       been behind the “most sophisticated attack ever seen”
• Pegasus is a spyware developed by NSO Group, an Israeli company that specialises in what experts call cyber weapons. It first came to the limelight in 2016, when an Arab activist got suspicious after receiving a shady message. It was believed that Pegasus was targeting iPhone users. Several days after its discovery Apple released an updated version of iOS, which reportedly patched the security loophole that Pegasus was using to hack phones.
  However, a year later, security researchers found that Pegasus was equally capable of infecting Android phones.
• Pegasus, in fact, is widely sought after because it can hack into iPads and iPhones despite Apple products being touted to be among the safest and best for data privacy.
• To make matters worse, those operating the software can even turn on a phone’s camera and microphone to capture activity in the phone’s vicinity.
• Pegasus “can monitor up to 500 phones in a year, but can only track a maximum of 50 at one go”. The report, citing sources, adds that it costs about $7-8 million per year to license Pegasus
• Pegasus, in fact, is widely sought after because it can hack into iPads and iPhones despite Apple products being touted to be among the safest and best for data privacy.
• To make matters worse, those operating the software can even turn on a phone’s camera and microphone to capture activity in the phone’s vicinity.
• Pegasus “can monitor up to 500 phones in a year, but can only track a maximum of 50 at one go”. The report, citing sources, adds that it costs about $7-8 million per year to license Pegasus
• Pegasus can be used to gather a vast amount of victim information: “Passwords, contact lists, calendar events, text messages, and live voice calls from popular mobile messaging apps.”
• “Pegasus could even listen to encrypted audio streams and read encrypted messages”.
• Then there are the other aspects that make Pegasus an extremely sophisticated software.
• For one, Pegasus “self-destructs” if it can’t communicate with the hacker’s control centre for over 60 days or if it “detects” that it has been installed on a device with the wrong SIM card since NSO made Pegasus for targeted spying on selected victims, not just anyone.

Basically, it can spy on every aspect of the target’s life.

• Pegasus has been developed by the Israeli firm NSO Group
  NSO’s goal was “to develop technology that would provide law enforcement and intelligence agencies with direct remote access to mobile phones and their content – a workaround to the increasingly widespread use of encryption in the digital environment”

• if you have an iPhone running iOS 14 or a phone with Android 11, and you have the latest version of the key apps like WhatsApp installed on your phone, you do not have to worry about classic Pegasus.
• But that doesn’t mean your phone is hack-proof. There is no computer or phone that is hack-proof. Software like Pegasus uses zero-day security holes to infect devices. This means that they use security holes in phones, computers and apps that even companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and others do not know.

• NSO Group still exists, and it is possible that so does an updated version of Pegasus, or some other spyware that the public doesn’t know about.
• NSO does not openly name who buys its software. But its website does say that its products are used exclusively “by government intelligence and law enforcement agencies to fight crime and terror”.

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