Android Security This Newly Discovered Snooping Tool Has Remarkable Spying Abilities

Android Security This Newly Discovered Snooping Tool Has Remarkable Spying Abilities – Pegasus can infect phones using “zero-click” attacks, which do not require interaction from the phone’s owner to succeed. Composite: AFP via GettyView full screen image

Pegasus can infect phones using “zero-click” attacks, which do not require interaction from the phone’s owner to succeed. Composite: AFP via Getty

Android Security This Newly Discovered Snooping Tool Has Remarkable Spying Abilities

It is the name of perhaps the most powerful spyware ever developed – certainly by a private company. Once it has wormed its way into your phone, without you noticing, it can turn it into a 24/7 surveillance device. It can copy messages you send or receive, collect your photos and record your calls. It could secretly film you through your phone’s camera or activate the microphone to record your conversations. It can potentially identify where you are, where you’ve been and who you’ve met.

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Pegasus is the hacking software – or spyware – developed, marketed and licensed to governments around the world by the Israeli company NSO Group. It has the ability to infect billions of phones running either iOS or Android operating systems.

The earliest version of Pegasus discovered, caught by researchers in 2016, infected phones through what’s known as spear phishing — text messages or emails that trick a target into clicking on a malicious link.

The data leak is a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, since 2016, are believed to have been picked by hobbyists by government clients of NSO Group, which sells surveillance software. The data also includes the time and date the numbers were selected or entered into the system. Forbidden Stories, a non-profit journalism organisation, and Amnesty International initially had access to the list, sharing access with 16 media organisations, including the Guardian. More than 80 journalists have been working together for several months as part of the Pegasus project. Amnesty’s Security Lab, the project’s technical partner, conducted the forensic analyses.

The organization believes the data indicates potential targets identified by the NSO’s government clients prior to potential surveillance. While the data is indicative of intent, the presence of a number in the data does not indicate whether an attempt was made to infect the phone with spyware such as Pegasus, the company’s signature detection tool, or whether the attempt was successful. The presence in the data of a handful of landlines and US numbers, which NSO says is “technically impossible” to access with its tools, reveals that some targets were chosen by NSO’s customers, even though they could not be infected by Pegasus. However, forensics on a small sample of cell phones with listed numbers found a close correlation between the time and date of a number in the data and the onset of Pegasus activity – in some cases to within seconds.

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Amnesty examined 67 smartphones where attacks were suspected. Of these, 23 were infected and 14 showed signs of attempted penetration. For the remaining 30, the tests were inconclusive, in several cases because the handset had been changed. Fifteen of the phones were Android devices, none of which showed signs of a successful infection. However, unlike the iPhone, phones using Android do not record the kind of information required for Amnesty’s detective work. Three Android phones showed signs of targeting, such as Pegasus-related SMS messages.

Amnesty shared “copies” of four iPhones with Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto research group specializing in Pegasus research, which confirmed they showed signs of Pegasus infection. Citizen Lab also peer-reviewed Amnesty’s forensic investigations and concluded that they were sound.

While the data is organized into clusters, indicative of individual NSO customers, it does not indicate which NSO customer was responsible for selecting a particular number. NSO says it sells its tools to 60 customers in 40 countries, but declines to identify them. By looking closely at the pattern of individual customers in the leaked data, media outlets were able to identify 10 governments believed to be responsible for selecting the targets: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, India, and the United Arab Emirates. Citizen Lab has also found evidence that all 10 are NSO clients.

You can read NSO Group’s full statement here. The company has always said it doesn’t have access to data about its customers’ goals. Through its lawyers, NSO said the group had made “false assumptions” about which customers were using the company’s technology. It said the figure of 50,000 was “exaggerated” and that the list could not be a list of numbers “targeted by governments using Pegasus”. The lawyers said NSO has reason to believe that the list accessed by the group “is not a list of numbers targeted by governments using Pegasus, but may be part of a larger list of numbers that may have been used by NSO Group clients for other purposes “. They said it was a list of numbers that anyone could search in an open system. After further questioning, the lawyers said the consortium based its findings “on a misleading interpretation of data leaked from publicly available and publicly available sources, such as HLR search services, which have nothing to do with Pegasus’ or anyone else’s list of customer targets.” NSO products … we still see no correlation of these lists to anything related to the use of NSO Group technology.” Following publication, they explained that they considered a “target” to be a phone that was the subject of a successful or attempted (but failed) infection by Pegasus and reiterated that the list of 50,000 phones was too large to represent Pegasus’ “goals”. They said the fact that a number appeared on the list was in no way indicative of whether it had been selected for Pegasus surveillance.

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The term HLR, or Home Location Record, refers to a database required to operate a cellular network. Such logs keep records of phone users’ network and general locations, along with other identifying information routinely used to route calls and text messages. Telecommunications and surveillance experts say HLR data can sometimes be used in the early stages of surveillance efforts, when determining whether a phone can be connected. The Association understands that NSO customers have the ability through an interface on the Pegasus system to perform HLR search queries. It is unclear whether Pegasus operators need to perform HRL search queries through its interface to use its software; An NSO source emphasized that its customers may have different reasons – unrelated to Pegasus – for conducting HLR searches through NSO systems.

Since then, however, NSO’s offensive capabilities have become more advanced. Pegasus infections can be achieved through so-called “zero-click” attacks, which do not require communication from the phone’s owner to be successful. This will often take advantage of “zero-day” vulnerabilities, which are flaws or bugs in the operating system that the mobile phone manufacturer is not yet aware of and therefore has not been able to fix.

In 2019, WhatsApp revealed that NSO’s software had been used to send malware to more than 1,400 phones by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability. Simply by making a WhatsApp call to a target device, malicious Pegasus code could be installed on the phone, even if the target never answered the call. Recently, NSO has begun exploiting vulnerabilities in Apple’s iMessage software, giving it access to hundreds of millions of iPhones. Apple says it is constantly updating its software to prevent such attacks.

The technical understanding of Pegasus, and how to find the evidence it leaves behind on a phone after a successful infection, has been improved by the research of Claudio Guarnieri, who runs Amnesty International’s security research lab in Berlin.

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“Things are getting a lot more complicated for the targets to notice,” said Guarnieri, who explained that NSO customers had largely abandoned suspicious SMS messages for more subtle zero-click attacks.

For companies like NSO, leveraging software that is either installed by default on devices, such as iMessage, or is widely used, such as WhatsApp, is particularly attractive because it greatly increases the number of mobile devices that Pegasus can attack.

As a technical partner of Project Pegasus, an international consortium of media organizations including the Guardian, Amnesty’s lab has discovered traces of successful Pegasus client attacks on iPhones running updated versions of Apple iOS. The attacks were carried out as late as July 2021.

Forensic analysis of victims’ phones has also revealed evidence suggesting that NSO’s constant search for vulnerabilities may have spread to other common applications. In some of the cases Guarnieri and his team analyzed, peculiar Internet traffic related to Apple’s Photos and Music apps can be seen around the time of the infections, suggesting that NSO may have started exploiting new vulnerabilities.

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Since neither spear-hunting nor zero-click attacks are successful, the Pegasus can also be placed over a wireless transceiver located near a target, or, according to an NSO brochure, simply set up manually if an agent can steal the target’s phone.

Once installed

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