How Pegasus spyware can hack your phone anytime anywhere.
4 min read
Phone users, do you know that there is a software/app that can successfully record your calls, copy all your messages, take your PINs and passwords, and secretly film you and use the information in the way the sender wants? This device has already gone to several countries around the world and the results are amazing. International media groups last week devoted a good aspect of their time to cover the events concerning the latest spy machine known as Pegasus Spyware. If all the details discussed by global media last week were anything to go by, then it will be correct to say that it is now more dangerous to use phones than to stay without phones. A couple of days ago, the news of the highly effective Pegasus Spyware reached Nigeria. According to the findings made by Umuaka Times, Pegasus Spyware has the effective capacity to “infect a phone through ‘zero-click’ attacks, which do not require any interaction from the phone’s owner to succeed.”
In a news report written by David Pegg and Sam Cutler of the London Guardian, Pegasus Spyware “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.”
Further findings from the London Guardian shows that, “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.”
Umuaka Times gathered that some highly placed global icons and personalities whose phones were hacked through the use of Pegasus Spyware accused Whatsapp of hacking their phones and other electronic devices, not knowing exactly what happened. In her defence, Whatsapp explained the roots of the problem and exonerated itself from the crime thereby, alerting the world that a software had been developed and used by another company to send malware to over 1,400 phones to hack their phones. Pegasus Spyware has the capacity to do the impossible. One can use it and make a whatsapp call, even without the owner picking the call and the number is automatically hacked.
Pegasus Spyware is a product of an Israel firm known as NSO Group. Many people have accused the company of trying to invade the privacy of phone users through Pegasus Spyware. Already, Amnesty International and other groups have all listed the NSO Group as a violator of human rights. Already, about 50,000 telephone numbers across 60 countries have been penciled down by some countries who have bought the NSO hacking device for investigations. Advocacy groups have accused the countries of using Pegasus Spyware to attack rights groups, journalists, activists and authors. A BBC report and other stories monitored by Umuaka Times last week showed that Pegasus has a target on journalists, activists and opposition groups around the world and got some useful details about them. The report also claims that Mexico and Panama governments have started to use the device. Global observers and institutions have accused the Pegasus manufacturers, an Israeli firm known as NSO of gross human rights abuses via Pegasus.
On the other hand, the NSO Group has denied all accusations relating to the activities of Pegasus Spyware “NSO in its defence says the software is intended for use against criminals and terrorists and is made available only to military, law enforcement and intelligence agencies from countries with good human rights records.” NSO claimed that “original investigation which led to the reports, by Paris-based NGO Forbidden Stories and the human rights group Amnesty International, was “full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories”. The firm eventually claimed that it would “continue to investigate all credible claims of misuse and take appropriate action.”
A news report monitored by Umuaka Times on the internet also says that NSO lawyers claimed that “Amnesty International’s technical report was conjecture, describing it as “a compilation of speculative and baseless assumptions”. However, they did not dispute any of its specific findings or conclusions.”
It was reported also in several media organizations last week that NSO has invested substantially to make its software very hard if not impossible to dictate and identify any phone that is infected by Pegasus.”Security researchers suspect more recent versions of Pegasus only ever inhabit the phone’s temporary memory, rather than its hard drive, meaning that once the phone is powered down virtually all trace of the software vanishes.”
To be continued next week.
