The Israeli espionage program Pegasus regained strength in public opinion this Monday, after it became known that the mobile phones of the president of Pedro Sánchez, and his defense minister, Margarita Robles, were victims of “illegal” and “external” wiretapping by this program, according to the Spanish government.
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“These are not assumptions,” declared, during a press conference called urgently, the Minister of the Presidency, Félix Bolaños, who spoke of “facts
of enormous gravity” that occurred in 2021.
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“We are absolutely certain that it is an external attack (…) because in Spain, in a democracy like ours, all interventions are carried out by official bodies and with judicial authorization,” Bolaños said.
This is all you need to know to understand what Pegasus is and how it works.
What is Pegasus?
Pegasus is a spy program that sneaks into the security “holes” of mobile phone operating systems to control them remotely and access all the functions of the attacked device.The software is designed by the Israeli company NSO Technologies and is sold primarily to governments, in theory, to combat terrorism and crime.
Once the mobile is infected, the hacker is able to detect the location, enter
in your applications, record conversations, access your emails, your contact list, photos and videos, read your messages or remotely activate the camera to take pictures.
How does it work?
Pegasus works through vulnerabilities found in a system and known as “zero day”, so called because the manufacturer “has zero days to protect its users,” cybersecurity specialist Deepak Daswani explained to Efe.
A peculiarity of Pegasus is that it takes advantage of these programming errors, that can occur in any of the services of a telephone -instant messaging, SMS, FaceTime, etc.- without the need for the user or the owner of the terminal to press
in no link or download anything new. Specifically, they are “remote code execution vulnerabilities.”
Which officials have been attacked?
In 2021, a list of 50,000 phone numbers of activists, journalists, business executives and politicians around the world who had been targets of espionage through Pegasus was released. Among them, the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador; the president of France, Emmanuel Macron; and the King of Morocco, Mohamed VI,
And what have governments done with Pegasus?
Following the Pegasus threat, governments around the world have ordered internal tracking of mobile devices.
Downing Street investigated several infected mobile phones in the offices of Boris Johnson during the summer of 2021, and although they found no conclusive evidence on the prime minister’s phone, they did find at least five devices intercepted in the Foreign Department, according to the magazine ‘New Yorkers’.
For its part, the Israeli company NSO Technologies reiterated that its only clients have been the governments of different countries, in order to combat terrorist threats and organized crime.
Can you be a victim of Pegasus? Which phones are most vulnerable?
Not all phones are equally vulnerable: for example, iPhones are more difficult to hack than Androids, the latter being “an open ecosystem, based on ‘open source'” (‘open source’), argues Daswani.
Now, this computer engineer clarified that It is very unlikely that anonymous citizens’ phones will suffer from this type of attack. “so sophisticated”, because “it is an advanced persistent threat” aimed at “very specific” targets and generally has a high price.
“The cost of this type of vulnerability usually amounts to a million dollars,” he specified, and stressed that operating system errors, once detected, can be reported to the manufacturer to be solved or sold to people who may be interested in that. security deficit.
How to know if a phone is infected?
To know if a phone is infected with Pegasus, it would be necessary to analyze the deviceDaswani commented, although there are some guidelines to avoid possible hacks, such as deactivating unused functions, deleting unused applications or restarting the phone more often than usual, because “we almost never restart it because we directly load it ”.
INTERNATIONAL WRITING
*With information from Efe and AFP.
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