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The newest and weirdest twist in this story, is that some of the government officials involved (which had no open investigations against them) are now "bringing
by shmatt 5y ago
The newest and weirdest twist in this story, is that some of the government officials involved (which had no open investigations against them) are now "bringing their phones to NSO" to check if they indeed had Pegasus installed on their phones[1]
Now, that would mean NSO has no logs on the phone numbers used to install Pegasus. I don't see how they would allow that
If that were true, any country (Saudi Arabia, UAE, for example) Who got a green light from the Israeli weapons export to purchase Pegasus, can now spy on the Israeli government, army, everyone at NSO, the Mossad, and 8200. And the Israeli's would never know? No way
NSO is playing dumb by saying "we can't know if you were hacked without your physical phone in our hands"
[1] https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/bjkftweyq https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/bjkftweyq (requires Google Translate)
- inglor 5y agoPegasus (like all products in that space) is an on-prem product, NSO send you the system limited to a number of usages and certain phone number restrictions and then you use it. To counter: do you really think every country purchasing Pegasus would want the Israeli government and NSO to be able to access all that information on their targets?
- yuvadam 5y agoCounter-argument: do you really think NSO would release their 0-click exploits to an on prem product that they have no control over? Citizen Lab reports show significant involvement of exploit delivery cloud infrastructure + plausible deniability.
- nneonneo 5y agoA sufficiently determined user (and these are often national governments) could easily target a phone they control. With sufficient monitoring and logging they could grab the exploit directly. The only thing stopping them is whatever contract/“EULA” they signed agreeing not to reverse engineer the product, and I doubt the big spooks would care about such a thing.
- ectopod 5y agoI would be surprised if every country gets exactly the same product.
- rmbyrro 5y agoI wonder if we could run a meta-hacking and weaponize Pegasus and the like against them? That would be funny to watch...