Pegasus Unbound: Spyware Infection Spreading Like a Global Wildfire

Earlier, PPSA reported on Pegasus – the spyware that can transform a device, including Apple iPhones, into an all-purpose microphone, camera and digital tracker. Users’ devices can be infected remotely, without any negligence or naïve acceptance of malicious code by the user.
 
Now Ronan Farrow turns his investigative eye in The New Yorker to the proliferation of   zero-click exploits. He reports:
 

• In democratic Spain, more than sixty phones owned by Catalan politicians, lawyers and activists have been targeted using Pegasus.

 

• Researchers found that a Pegasus-infected device connected to the network at 10 Downing Street and the Office of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

 

• NSO Group, the Israeli company that created Pegasus and sold it around the world, is financially teetering, creating further worries that the software will fully escape into the wild.

 

• NSO is now competing with similar spyware products sold by Russia, China and rogue hackers to governments, companies and individuals in world markets.

 
It’s time to call it: The smartphone, devised to liberate us by enabling communications and the sharing of knowledge around the world, is now a potential spy we take everywhere with us in purses and our pockets.