NSO Group, an Israeli surveillance company, has powerful hacking software called Pegasus and an important report in The guard, in collaboration with 16 other media organizations, including Amnesty International, has shown that it is, of course, completely abused.

What is Pegasus:

• NSO’s malware can infect both iPhones and Android smartphones with zero-click deployments, including the latest iPhones running iOS 14.6.
• It basically offers full access: once installed, it can “extract messages, photos and e-mails, record calls and secretly activate microphones”. That’s even the case with WhatsApp or Signal, as there is no need to decrypt messages.
• But everything is fine because NSO insists that it is only intended for government intelligence, law enforcement and the military to use against “criminals and terrorists”.
• This is how Pegasus works (WashPo, $).

And of course it is abused.

• The allure of almost foolproof hacking is, of course, too strong. The human instinct is hardly unknown at this point:
• The Big Bomb Report says that the relatively unlimited clandestine power of NSO technology is not just used to monitor real security interests.
• Instead, all kinds of people were monitored; a 2016 list of 50,000 names includes: “Hundreds of leaders, religious figures, academics, NGO workers, union officials and government officials, including cabinet ministers, presidents and prime ministers.”
• “The list also includes the number of close family members of a country’s ruler, suggesting that the ruler may have instructed his intelligence services to investigate the possibility of monitoring his own relatives.”
• “180 journalists are listed in the data, including reporters, editors and executives of the Financial Times, CNN, The New York Times, France 24, The Economist, Associated Press and Reuters. “
• To give you an idea, a sample of 67 phones used by “journalists, human rights defenders and lawyers” had the attack software installed in a sample from Amnesty’s security lab 37.
• But the number could be higher: since some phones had switched and Android phones don’t keep activity logs like iPhones do.
• Either way, this will be a hot topic during the week as the names become known. Read the first announcement and today’s reveal(The guard) a number of people targeted – such as French human rights attorney Joseph Breham, who was allegedly targeted by the Moroccan government: “There is no possible justification for a foreign state to listen to a French attorney. There is no legal, ethical or moral justification, ”he said.
• Wonderful. Reporting is also done through many other collaborating outlets.