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A Look at NSO’s Pegasus Spyware
Your smartphone probably cannot be secured.
The following comments are based my own experience with some of the tools and techniques used in Pegasus, on reports from Citizens Lab and Amnesty International, and information from purported Pegasus marketing materials, all viewed through the eyes of someone who has worked in signals intelligence and who has held special export licenses. But I will be clear that, so far, I have no firsthand experience with Pegasus itself, only some of the tricks that it uses.
NOTE: This article contains corrections since the original publication.
Background — Zero-Day bugs
The application processor in your smartphone runs a staggeringly complex collection of software. Some of that software has bugs that allow an attacker to take control of the device. These bugs, called “zero-days”, are rare and usually fixed promptly once they are known to handset vendors. Ethical hackers who discover these bugs report them to vendors so that they will be fixed. Unethical hackers sell this information to intelligence agencies and criminal organizations, sometimes for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Particularly large intelligence agencies, like those in the US or Russia, have their own internal teams to discover such bugs in secret.
