(A screenshot from NSO Group’s Pegasus Working Station software, showing locations of infected devices (as of March 2012).Leaked Hacking Team Emails via CitizenLab) “That's the only indication the user will ever have," Murray said.īut in the background, Pegasus was calling back to servers controlled by its creators, then downloading its malicious software, jailbreaking the device, and quickly infecting every aspect of the phone from messaging software to its repository of WiFi passwords with three "zero day" vulnerabilities, or unfixed bugs that can be exploited by hackers. “What we were looking at were three chained together iOS zero days," Murray told BI.Īfter clicking the link, the Safari browser quickly opened and then closed. Instead, he sent it to CitizenLab researchers Bill Marczak and John Scott-Railton, who used their own phone to click the link themselves - and then track what would happen next. "I could tell that these were unusual SMS's," Mansoor told Motherboard.
Though the phone number it came from was faked, and the text's claims were interesting, he didn't click.
10.Ī text sent to the iPhone 6 of Ahmed Mansoor, a prominent human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates, promised "new secrets about torture of Emiratis in state prisons" with a link. The revelation of Pegasus started with a text message on Aug. One of Murray's fellow researchers told him of how advanced Pegasus is: "Once you get this software on your phone, it’s not your phone anymore." 'This is a real exploit happening in the wild against real people' "The software leaves absolutely no indicators of compromise to the user," Mike Murray, vice president of security research and response at Lookout, a mobile security firm that researched the threat with CitizenLab, told Business Insider. Updating iOS to the current 9.3.5 version is crucial for all users, since Pegasus is designed to infect a person's phone and it is virtually impossible to detect.
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