This is how Pegasus, the spyware with which they infected Pedro Sánchez’s phone, acted

the spy program pegasuslinked to the Israeli company NSO, infected 50,000 phones of journalists, activists and politicians around the world last year. On Monday, the head of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the Minister of Defense, joined the list of victims. Margaret Oaks.

In two intrusions on Sánchez’s cell phone, In the month of May last year, 2.6 gigabytes and 130 megabytes of data were captured, while there were 9 megabytes of information on Robles ’case, in an attack in June 2021, according to government sources. however, the exact content of this data is currently unknown.

The Spanish government has not specified whether the attacks could be carried out by another country or by a large multinational corporation. The case is known in the midst of a political storm due to the espionage with which they were allegedly subjected. Catalan and Basque pro-independence leadersalso with Pegasus.

what is pegasus

It is a tool that allows those responsible not only to remotely access an infected computer but also control it and obtain personal information from its owner.

As the investigation conducted by the media consortium Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International revealed, with evidence obtained from forensic analysis conducted on the phones themselves, 50,000 phones worldwide could be targeted by Pegasus spyware, from the Israeli company that NSO.

Avast mobile threat analyst Jakub Vavra explained in a statement that Pegasus is a remote access tool (RAT) with spyware capabilitiesthat is, a tool with which you can remotely monitor someone’s phone and access objects such as the camera or microphone, or perform actions such as taking screenshots or the registration of pulsations.

The spying program is installed when the user clicks on a link from their phone, though sometimes it can be installed without a link, according to research. Through this, those responsible will be able to retrieve data from popular messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook and Viber, as well as email and browser services.

Facebook denounced NSO in 2020, a company it accuses of infecting a network of servers in the United States in 2019 to hack hundreds of smartphones and detect approximately 1,4000 targets via WhatsApp messaging its service.

what is spyware

The analyst points out that “it is used as a very selective tool”, because this software is “only used on certain individuals, apparently for tracking purposes”. It is common for other spyware to spread widely to reap a lot of user data.

“The minimal spread of spyware doesn’t make it any more dangerous, for every individual under surveillance the extent of privacy breaches is certainly very high,” Vavra said. A note consistent with what the person in charge of WhatsApp, Will Cathcart, made sure the software was used to “commit gruesome human rights abuses around the world“.

Washington Post and other means are not yet known what exactly is the purpose of the list of 50,000 names. They also don’t know who made the list and how many of the phones were hacked.

So far, they have confirmed that 37 have escaped, even if only for a few seconds.

Speaking to The Washington Post, The NSO Group declined to identify the governments where it sold the spyware.

Pegasus first hit the media front pages in 2016, when the prestigious Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto discovered iOS vulnerabilitiesApple’s mobile operating system.

Later in 2019, 1,400 people, including various Catalan politiciansare victims of Pegasus espionage, which took advantage of a vulnerability in WhatsApp to infiltrate phones.

With information from agencies.

SL