The consortium did not disclose how it had obtained the list, and it was unclear whether the list was aspirational or whether the people had actually been targeted with NSO spyware.Īmong those listed were Azam Ahmed, who had been the Mexico City bureau chief for The Times and who has reported widely on corruption, violence and surveillance in Latin America, including on NSO itself and Ben Hubbard, The Times’ bureau chief in Beirut, who has investigated rights abuses and corruption in Saudi Arabia and wrote a recent biography of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. APPLE SECURITY UPDATE SPYWARE FLAW IPHONES FREEIn July, NSO became the subject of further scrutiny after Amnesty International, the human rights watchdog, and Forbidden Stories, a group that focuses on free speech, teamed up with a consortium of media organisations on “The Pegasus Project” to publish a list of 50,000 phone numbers, including some used by journalists, government leaders, dissidents and activists, that they said had been selected as targets by NSO’s clients. APPLE SECURITY UPDATE SPYWARE FLAW IPHONES SERIESStarting in 2016, a series of New York Times investigations revealed the presence of NSO’s spyware on the iPhones of Emirati activists lobbying for expanded voting rights Mexican nutritionists lobbying for a national soda tax lawyers looking into the mass disappearance of 43 Mexican students academics who helped write anti-corruption legislation journalists in Mexico and England and an American representing victims of sexual abuse by Mexico’s police. The company has said that it sells its spyware only to governments that meet strict human rights standards and that it expressly requires customers to agree to use its spyware only to track terrorists or criminals.īut over the past six years, NSO’s Pegasus spyware has turned up on the phones of activists, dissidents, lawyers, doctors, nutritionists and even children in countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico. NSO did not immediately respond to inquiries Monday.Īlso read | Will India bite into Apple's new offerings? APPLE SECURITY UPDATE SPYWARE FLAW IPHONES SOFTWARE“Attacks like the ones described are highly sophisticated, cost millions of dollars to develop, often have a short shelf life and are used to target specific individuals,” Krstić said.Īpple has said it plans to introduce new security defenses for iMessage, Apple’s texting application, in its next iOS 15 software update, expected later this year. On Monday, Ivan Krstić, Apple’s head of security engineering and architecture commended Citizen Lab for its findings and urged customers to run the latest software updates for the fixes to take effect, by installing iOS 14.8, MacOS 11.6 and WatchOS 7.6.2. Such abilities can fetch millions of dollars on the underground market for hacking tools, where governments are not regulators but are clients and are among the most lucrative spenders. APPLE SECURITY UPDATE SPYWARE FLAW IPHONES FULLBut NSO’s zero-click capability meant victims received no such prompt, and the flaw enabled full access to a person’s digital life. In the past, victims learned their devices were infected by spyware only after receiving a suspicious link texted to their phone or email, and sharing the link with journalists or cybersecurity experts. It signals a serious escalation in the cybersecurity arms race, with governments willing to pay whatever it takes to spy on digital communications en masse, and with tech companies, human rights activists and others racing to uncover and fix the latest vulnerabilities that enable such surveillance.Īlso read | Smart glasses made google look dumb. The discovery means that more than 1.65 billion Apple products in use worldwide have been vulnerable to NSO’s spyware since at least March. “This spyware can do everything an iPhone user can do on their device and more,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, who teamed up with Bill Marczak, a senior research fellow at Citizen Lab, on the finding. Using the zero-click infection method, Pegasus can turn on a user’s camera and microphone, record messages, texts, emails, calls - even those sent via encrypted messaging and phone apps like Signal - and send them back to NSO’s clients at governments around the world.
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