“We believe that the bug is distinctive enough to point back to NSO,” Citizen Lab said in a blogpost. An exploit is a technical vulnerability that allows spyware to infect a phone, and the code of the exploit discovered by Citizen Lab contained a specific bug that the researchers had only ever associated with NSO Group’s Pegasus in the past. But investigations – including the recent publication of the Pegasus Project by the Guardian and other outlets – have revealed ways in which the spyware has been used by government clients to target journalists and human rights activists around the world.Īsked for comment, NSO Group issued a statement saying: “NSO Group will continue to provide intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world with life-saving technologies to fight terror and crime.”Ĭitizen Lab said it was able to make a “high-confidence attribution” that the exploit had been created by NSO Group because they observed “multiple distinctive elements” in the spyware. NSO Group has said that its spyware is only meant to be used by licensed law enforcement agencies to target criminals and terrorists. When it is successfully deployed against a target, NSO Group’s spyware, called Pegasus, can silently hack into a phone, collect a user’s personal and private information, intercept calls and messages, and even turn a mobile phone into a remote listening device. “Today is going to be a rough day at NSO because the lights are going to go out on one of their most productive exploits,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior Citizen Lab researcher. Researchers said the speed with which Apple was seeking to fix the vulnerability to its operating system, which in effect has allowed the latest iPhones and operating systems to be vulnerable to attack by NSO Group’s government clients, underscored the “absolute seriousness” of their findings.
0 kommentar(er)
