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The Spanish PM and the defence minister were infected by Pegasus (in Spanish)
- aaron695 4y ago
- gotbeans 4y agoThis comes timely after the "catalangate" https://citizenlab.ca/2022/04/catalangate-extensive-mercenary-spyware-operation-against-catalans-using-pegasus-candiru/ https://citizenlab.ca/2022/04/catalangate-extensive-mercenar... The case had already escalated to the EU.
- agarsev 4y agoGiven that the spying on catalan independentists started under the previous government (right wing, strongly centralist), I wouldn't discard it extended subsequently to the current one (coalition of left wing and extreme left, some of which friendly to catalan nationalists). It remains to be seen if the analysis they are conducting now reveals other members of the government who have been spied too. I guess this could come from the previous government, rogue elements of the state, or an international actor, but I wonder if we wil be told when and if it is found out.
- baisq 4y agoThe hacks started last summer.
- tgv 4y agoTimely? It could easily have been the same actor.
- boomboomsubban 4y agoAs all these damn names blend together, Pegasus is the Israeli NSO Group's spyware. Usually you could read the article to be reminded which spyware it was, but this is in Spanish and the term "NSO" isn't on the page.
- tgv 4y agoIf you'd have bothered to click on the link that mentions it has been illegally used in 20 countries, you'd have been able to read that. But what's the importance anyway?
- boomboomsubban 4y ago>But what's the importance anyway? Proper attribution? So other's don't have to do a quick Wikipedia check to remind them which one is Pegasus.
- baisq 4y ago
- ainiriand 4y agoThis comment sounds biased to me.
- ErneX 4y agoAccording to the government, these hacks occurred between May and June 2021, and they are announcing and denouncing this today. After the reports of the catalan independency politicians being spied with the same tool. The timing is terrible and raises obvious suspicions.
- ainiriand 4y agoAgree with the overall discussion. It is just the general phrasing of the parent comment that gave me this impression.
- corderop 4y ago> he would sell his own mother to stay power I don't totally agree with this, but I agree with the think that this is likely a strategy to avoid people talking about his government spying other parties politicians using Pegasus.
- guiriduro 4y agoOr ... the forces interested in spying on politicians answer neither to him nor to the catalans. While I don't disagree with your characterisation of Prime Minister Sanchez, is it not at least as likely that the forces doing the spying view both Sanchez and the catalans as valid targets? When you look around the Spanish monarchical/military/judicial/political landscape, are there not several more likely sources of hidden and not-so-hidden power that want to keep their vassals under control?
- ikurei 4y agoI can understand not liking Sanchez, although your comment seems too much. But El Diario, while being biased to the left, has never seemed to me like particularly loyal to PSOE. I used to read El País and I stopped exactly for that reason, but El Diario seems to me like one of the few still doing real journalism. I love it when I find comments on HN discussing their own countries politics, especially if I don’t know a lot about their country. I hope other readers remember to take your comment, and of course mine, with generous pinches of salt.
- WilTimSon 4y agoI wonder how many more high-profile targets will be revealed before anything is done. Last I remember, Israel said it's not at any fault and that Pegasus was a defensive project or some such excuse.
- azernik 4y agoThe Israeli line isn't that Pegasus is a "defensive project"; it's that they sell it to governments for spying on targets in their own countries that they have jurisdiction over.
- paganel 4y agoBetween Israel and a country like Spain the US will always, always choose Israel, the ties between the two countries and especially between their political systems are too strong. As such, nothing at all will be done.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> Between Israel and a country like Spain the US will always, always choose Israel This is no longer a safe assumption. Trans-Atlantic coöperation is at a high. This satisfies deep American geostrategic aims, ones far deeper than those around Israel.
- usrn 4y agoI'll agree when I see it.
- corderop 4y agoEvery time I heard from Pegasus I wonder why nobody is talking about how illegal this business is and how EU and other countries are talking nothing about the use of this.
- ben_w 4y agoThe impression I have — and I’d be very interested to find out if I’m right or wrong — is that governments basically all spy on each other all the time, and they consider this normal and only problematic when it touches certain very specific projects. Something about it being important to know the capabilities of your friends and your enemies, and to test the quality of your intelligence and counterintelligence assets before it becomes critical: you don’t want to start stupid wars you can’t win, nor waste money fighting wars to end the non-existent threat of non-existent WMDs. I can’t tell the difference between espionage that gets overlooked, espionage that gets chest-thumping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, and espionage that gets kinetic responses, but I assume there must be such divisions.
- kingcharles 4y agoAnd the funny thing is that most of the spies are actually known to each nation. Whenever you hear about country X has evicted Y number of "diplomats" from the embassy, that is just a few spies getting thrown out to make a point (and of course the evicted country will throw out a few spies in retaliation). What has been interesting of late is the mass evictions of known Russian spies from even the smallest of nations like Belgium. And of course, Russian has been throwing out Western agents at an equal rate these last few weeks. There are a lot of spies on desk duty right now...
- nonrandomstring 4y ago> The impression I have — and I’d be very interested to find out if I’m right or wrong — is that governments basically all spy on each other all the time Yes. That's exactly what NSA, GCHQ, MI6 etc are tasked to do.[1] The problem came when foreign intelligence got confused with domestic intelligence. This is further compounded by the change in procurement of specialist technologies that the army or government offices might once have had. In the 80s a prime-minister would communicate with a special "scrambler" (supplied by the security services and designed against foreign espionage). Today everyone uses the same gear made in China, and the market for offensive cyberweapons is both international and privatised. Here is a quote from [2] "" For complex reasons the US embargo on Huawei, while looking like a trade dispute, more or less proves this. Simply; western phones have backdoors and remote controls for western governments. Chinese phones have backdoors for Communist Party intelligence apparatus. Each spies on their own citizens and everybody is happy (except the citizens that end up in camps). It's the presence of the other's spyware within the respective borders/markets that is the problem, do you see? So when these powers fell out, or failed to reach agreement on data sharing, this escalated into an issue with clear symmetry. We see that products by Apple, Google or Amazon are to be trusted no more than Huawei handsets. Indeed, the safest phone for a Chinese citizen is probably an Apple iPhone, whereas the safest phone for a western civilian would be a Huawei, because historically, people are most risk from their *own* government's domestic surveillance than a foreign government's international surveillance. "" The upshot of this is that offensive cyberweapons, which are indiscriminate, persistent, reusable and infinitely replicatable at near zero cost (all the worst qualities of a weapon on par with bioweapons) affect all strata of society. Politicians, military generals, schoolteachers and pizza delivery guys are equally exposed. This marks a significant transition that blurs the boundaries between civil and military war, as the current Russo-Ukraine conflict shows. We're all soldiers now. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-20949,00.html https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-20... [2] https://digitalvegan.net https://digitalvegan.net
- usrn 4y agoIt almost seems like Pegasus has been used most heavily against the allies of the US.
- WJW 4y agoMight just be selection bias though? Western countries are a lot more open about that sort of thing than many other cultures, and most Western countries are also US allies. Therefore even if every single leader of a country got targeted, you would still expect the majority of (published) stories to be about US allies.
- qeternity 4y agoThey’re also a lot more capable of detection, often assisted by the US.
- bigbacaloa 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pachico 4y agoWell, if you can get your device infected by playing Candy Crush and similar, I expect the entire Spanish parliament to be spied by Pegasus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfcIMCYXSxQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfcIMCYXSxQ
- everdrive 4y agoMost the of the conversation around Pegasus has rightly focused around how shocking and casual the widespread sale and use of this malware is. But, I wonder if there's another story here: nearly all world leaders have a target-able device with cameras, microphones, GPS, and personal and professional conversations (and therefore contact lists) which they carry with them 24/7. At what point does the risk outweigh the convenience? I'm not sure what the solution is, but I wish that smartphones were not seen as a default necessity for everybody. Risks such as Pegasus are introduced, and it seems hard to go back to how things were.
- haddr 4y agoI look back with nostalgia when Obama was using Blackberry (with some extra security). I just wonder what should world leaders use today…
- FrenchDevRemote 4y agoprobably a pinephone or another phone with physical switches and it should be only used for non-sensitive stuff, and with a removed battery when it's not needed any sensitive stuff just can't be safe on the current phone OSes imo
- asplake 4y agoHere in the UK the standard appears to be government by WhatsApp
- tacker2000 4y agoYea, in my opinion thats also the actual problem here. World leaders using run of the mill iphones poses a real security risk. They should be using some hardened ultra secure device or other communication methods.
- Melatonic 4y agoKind of too bad we lost Blackberry - they seemed to be focusing on this sort of thing. Maybe this is someone a large country could develop internally themselves? Create their own fork of Android, private app store, etc etc?
- eis 4y agoHere an english article: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/spanish-prime-ministers-telephone-infected-by-pegasus-spyware-2022-05-02/ https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/spanish-prime-ministers...
- rattray 4y agoIn seriousness, who (that the Israelis would sell to) would target the Spanish PM & Defense Minister? This is clearly a use-case of military espionage, not of an intrusive police state. Leaving questions of tools and their creators aside, who is making these decisions and why?
- Melatonic 4y agoNobody expects the Spanish inquisition!
- spaniard89277 4y agoPretty much everyone spies everyone, and that includes several institutions inside spain who are constantly against each other, not to mention the central gov vs other regional govs, being the Catalan one the most notorious for obvious reasons.
- ucha 4y agoMorocco bought Pegasus and they've quite frequently entered in diplomatic spats with Spain over the last few years over the disputed Sahara.
- zx85wes 4y agoFor people who are interested : https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210930-algeria-morocco-standoff-threatens-spain-gas-supplies https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20210930-algeria-moroc...
- bigbacaloa 4y agoFrance or Germany.
- mon2may2022 4y ago
- loquetapetezca 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hyperman1 4y agoAre there technical details about Pegasus available? If the public could look into the installed executable, map out its internals, see the attack vector,... then some countermeasures could be developed by interested people. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
- SnowHill9902 4y ago“Pegasus” is supposed to be a bundle of exploits with a dashboard. There’s no open sourcing that could help since each exploit is zero day or close to it.
- hyperman1 4y agoIsn't the exploit only for the malware drop? The malware itself can then be analyzed even if tje exploit cant.
- robotnikman 4y agoYes, and from what we have seen so far the malware taking advantage of the exploits is extremely sophisticated, such as the one taking advantage of a flaw in the iPhones PDF reader which was used to bootstrap an entire custom made virtual machine used to read contents from memory. Even if you patch one exploit and analyze the malware, there are plenty more to be found, and it seems like they develop custom made malware solutions for each one.
- belter 4y agoYou can start here. "Technical Analysis of Pegasus Spyware" [PDF]: https://info.lookout.com/rs/051-ESQ-475/images/lookout-pegasus-technical-analysis.pdf https://info.lookout.com/rs/051-ESQ-475/images/lookout-pegas...
- macilacilove 4y agoSince NSO claimed that they only sold to national governments, this means Pegasus was used cross-border, or NSO lied about that. (maybe both)
- nickpeterson 4y agoThe fact that states control these programs like military weapons makes things really murky. Is Apple even allowed to buy a copy and close all the backdoors it uses? Or sue the Israeli government for compromising their operating systems? I doubt it.
- rank0 4y agoApple is in fact suing NSO IIRC. But honestly what do you expect? Any nations military will always stockpile weapons. Malware isn’t just “controlled like weapons” they ARE weapons.
- nickpeterson 4y agoYeah but what does suing them even accomplish, it’s not like the nso is going to have to pay up.
- boredumb 4y agoThe PROMIS scandal (involving none other than ghislaine maxwell's father Robert Maxwell) is an interesting historical on where we are today and who the west should consider as an ally with regards to creating malicious software in order violate human rights.