Explained: How Israeli’s Pegasus Reached India?

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In late 2019, Facebook initiated a suit against NSO, claiming that Pegasus had been used to intercept the WhatsApp communications of a number of activists, journalists, and bureaucrats in India, leading to accusations that the Indian government was involved.

New Delhi (ABC Live India): The selected Indian media on Sunday has published a list of journalists whose phones were hacked by Israeli Pegasus spyware for tapping their tele- conversation.

The Media reports say that list of tampered phones include names of judges of Supreme Court India and two ministers of Modi’s Government.

It is mention-worthy that international media like the Washington Post and 16 media partners led by the Paris-based journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories claimed that they have a list containing the names of 50K names of persons whose privacy have been tampered with Israeli spyware, and Indian media have borrowed the names of Indians from them.

The Government of India issued a clarification that denying the claim made by the Indian publishers of the list.

Whereas the NSO Group also rejected the claims made by Forbidden Stories that, “We would like to emphasize that NSO sells it technologies solely to law enforcement and intelligence agencies of vetted governments for the sole purpose of saving lives through preventing crime and terror acts. NSO does not operate the system and has no visibility to the data.”

Know what is Israeli’s Pegasus spyware?

Pegasus is spyware that can be covertly installed on mobile phones (and other devices) running some versions of Apple's mobile operating system iOS, and Android. It was developed by the Israeli cyber firm NSO Group, which states that it provides "authorized governments with technology that helps them combat terror and crime.

The spyware is named after the mythical winged horse Pegasus—it is a Trojan horse that can be sent "flying through the air" to infect phones.

Pegasus spyware was First Revealed in 2016

The Israeli spyware came into public notice in August 2016 when a failed attempt was made while installing it on an iPhone belonging to a human rights activist namely Ahmed Mansoor, and thereafter an investigation revealed the details about the Pegasus spyware, its abilities, and the security vulnerabilities it exploited.

As per cyber experts, the Pegasus is capable of reading text messagestracking calls, collecting passwords, tracking location, accessing the target device's microphone and camera, and harvesting information from apps.

After the reported Pegasus spyware attack, Apple was forced to release its version 9.3.5 of its iOS software to fix the vulnerabilities caused by Pegasus.

How Pegasus spyware reached India?

In late 2019, Facebook initiated a suit against NSO, claiming that Pegasus had been used to intercept the WhatsApp communications of a number of activists, journalists, and bureaucrats in India, leading to accusations that the Indian government was involved.

For details ABC Research Report on Pegasus spyware

Write an email: karan@abclive.in

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