been deployed by up to 40 nations as techno responses to the increased sophistication of organized criminal groups, drug traffi ckers, and terrorists. According to news
SPYWARE Investigators have questioned whether Pegasus software was used to track the movements of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul four years ago.
Emirates. They had allegedly installed
Pegasus on the phone of Hanan Elatr, Khashoggi’s wife, just months before he was strangled and dismembered with a saw inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2018. NSO has strongly denied its
spyware was used to keep tabs on Khashoggi or his wife. The Pegasus Project, led by a
global coalition of news organizations, exposed the widespread targeting of journalists, politicians, and activists. Even the phones of French
President Emmanuel Macron, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, and Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan were corrupted. NSO is one of the many high-
tech defense fi rms that emerged out of Israel’s wars of survival and its campaign against terrorism. The NSO Group, based in a Silicon
Valley-type industrial park north of Tel Aviv, is reported to employ hundreds of high-tech professionals as well as military and intelligence service veterans. The software is designed
to penetrate smartphones and applications with what’s known as zero-click access — a tactic to enter a targeted system without the user ever having to swipe one way or another, click anything, or even activate the device. Pegasus, and systems like it, have
reports, Pegasus played a critical role in the 2011 arrest of Mexican drug lord Joaquin Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, better known to the world as El Chapo. He is currently serving a life sentence at a supermax prison in
Colorado. To avoid any confl icts with the U.S.
government, Pegasus was designed so it cannot hack into U.S. phones. But in January, the Times reported that the FBI had purchased the spyware in 2019, despite reports that it had been used against activists and political opponents in other countries. It spent two years discussing
whether to deploy a newer product, Phantom, inside the United States. A brochure for Phantom, obtained
by the Times, says it allows American law enforcement and spy agencies to “turn your target’s smartphone into an intelligence gold mine.” After two years of discussions
with the Justice Department, the FBI ultimately decided not to use it. The Commerce Department put
NSO on what is known as an entity list, a sanction that denies a company’s ability to access American technologies and technological platforms from U.S.- based servers to hardware produced by companies such as Dell. The greatest threat to the NSO
Group and its cyberweapons may yet come from Israel itself. In January, it was revealed that
the Israeli police used Pegasus to unlawfully spy on citizens and foreign nationals — either by design or accident — without warrants or justifi cation. Worse, Pegasus was used by police offi cials who opposed former Prime
Is Your Phone Infected?
I
t’s daunting to think every single word you say on your phone — no matter how private or confidential — can be tracked 24 hours a day by spy software. Here’s how to find out if your Android or iOS device is infected. Amnesty International, the global
group fighting to end human rights abuses, off ers a free program called Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT), which conducts a top-to-bottom forensic analysis of your phones. The software, which runs on your
personal computer and studies data — including backup files exported from your iPhone or Android — can detect even the tiniest traces of Pegasus, the spyware devised to covertly harvest information from smartphones. It’s available on Amnesty Tech’s GitHub site.
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. One former Israeli intelligence offi cer described the news as an earthquake of Watergate proportions that threatens the viability of Israel’s vibrant democracy. NSO Group insists it plays by
the rules. In a recent statement the company said: “Once there is a suspicion that a customer misuses the technology sold by NSO, the company will investigate and will terminate the contract, if found true.” The company says its mission
is creating “technology that helps government agencies prevent and investigate terrorism and crime to save thousands of lives around the globe.” In an odd twist, the spyware
controversy has resulted in some security-conscious consumers ditching their pricey bells-and- whistles phones for so-called “dumb phones.” H.Y. Group, an importer of Nokia
to Israel, has reported a 200% increase in the purchase of older-generation phones, according to the Jerusalem Post’s online news service Walla.
MAY 2022 | NEWSMAX MAXLIFE 69
OZAN KOSE/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
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