The Pegasus Project!
Project Pegasus is the name of a huge investigative project launched by a large group of major respected international newspapers led by the American Washington Post and the British Guardian to expose the practices and suspicious activities of the Pegasus phone spying application. The spyware is owned by the major Israeli company NSO and sells it to the governments of many countries, including Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, India, and Mexico to monitor the phones of many politicians, activists and public figures. The journalistic project kicked off after anonymous leak of 50,000 phone numbers list designated as targets of the Pegasus program, and immediately the technical laboratory of Amnesty International was called on to carry on forensic analysis on wide range of those phones.
After examining a sample of those phones, the task-force found traces of this spyware program on many of them (among those phones infected with the spy virus, targets in the French Elysee, the Egyptian government, the fiancée of the assassinated Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and hundreds of others). The case turned the world around creating huge backlash against NSO, Israeli diplomacy began attempts to contain this scandal through statements, press conferences and shuttle visits to the affected governments, this is in addition to the complete denial and complete disavowal by NSO (on its website, NSO says that it does not help its clients spy on civilian targets, but it seeks To penetrate terrorist targets similar to “Bin Laden” in order to protect world peace and save lives from possible terrorist attacks).
Edward Snowden, the global activist in the field of counter-surveillance and espionage (revealed before about the extensive US spying on its citizens after the September 11 attacks through the famous PRISM program) says that smartphones are currently “spies inside our pockets”, the problem is that Pegasus infiltrates your phone without us knowing. in the form of an innocent message (SMS or WhatsApp message), as soon as it reaches you, the program enters your phone, which is completely vulnerable to hacking, and all its contents (photos, messages, email, contact list, etc.) are accessed without even pressing the message content “Zero-Click”. (for iPhones that are more vulnerable to easy hacking), or by simply clicking on the content “One-Click” (in the case of Android devices, which are better off in terms of security hardware than the iPhone).
Several months ago, the phone of “Jeff Bezos” — founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post — was hacked through the same program through one of the Gulf governments that bought the technology from the Israeli company, and perhaps this led to the wide wave of awareness against that technology and an attempt to expose and contain it.
Personal security and information security is now more serious than ever, the following article explains how you can protect your phone against technologies like “Pegasus”, now they spy on public figures, but who knows, soon they may spy on huge numbers of people in order to collect And analyze the information and selling it to the nearest buyer offers an attractive price!
