Back in 2019, Pegasus created quite a buzz for spying on people. Now it has hacked mobile numbers of over 300 Indians. Pegasus is a spyware developed by Israeli cyber arms firm NSO Group. The spyware can be installed on mobile phones running on both Android and iOS. As the recent events suggest the spyware can exploit recent versions on iOS.
The biggest news in the state is that Pegasus has hacked mobile numbers of two govt ministers, a judge of the supreme court, three ministers from the opposition and the list includes 40 plus journalists.
What is Pegasus?
Pegasus is a spyware named after the mythical horse. It is created by cyber arms firm NSO group. The first news about Pegasus came in 2016 after the assassination of a Saudi Arab journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In 2019, Facebook claimed that Pegasus intercepting Whatsapp communication of journalists, activists and bureaucrats in India and initiated a lawsuit against the NSO group. The claim led to the accusation that the Indian govt is involved in it. Whatsapp also informed its users about the vulnerability of their information. Now in 2021, phone numbers of Indian ministers, activists, journalists and opposition are found on a database of NSO hacking targets by Project Pegasus. Pegasus was also used to spy on Jeff Bezos after Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, exchanged messages with him that exploited then-unknown vulnerabilities in WhatsApp.
Project Pegasus Revelation
A Paris based media non-profit organisation Forbidden Stories and Amnesty Internal got a leaked list of over 50,000 phone numbers. It was believed to be those people of interest by clients of NSO. They shared the information with seventeen other media organisations. It was called “Project Pegasus”, and after investigation, evidence was found that many phones with numbers in the list had been targets of Pegasus spyware.
0
20
