Pegasus (spyware)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Pegasus
Developer(s)NSO Group
Operating systemiOS, Android
Websitehttps://nsogroup.com

Pegasus is spyware developed by the Israeli cyberarms firm NSO Group that can be covertly installed on mobile phones (and other devices) running most[1] versions of iOS and Android.[2] The 2021 Project Pegasus revelations suggest that the current Pegasus software can exploit all recent iOS versions up to iOS 14.6.[1] As of 2016, Pegasus was capable of reading text messages, tracking calls, collecting passwords, location tracking, accessing the target device's microphone and camera, and harvesting information from apps.[3] The spyware is named after Pegasus, the winged horse of Greek mythology. It is a Trojan horse computer virus that can be sent "flying through the air" to infect cell phones.[4]

NSO Group was previously owned by American private equity firm Francisco Partners,[5] but it was bought back by its founders in 2019.[6] The company states that it provides "authorized governments with technology that helps them combat terror and crime."[7][8] NSO Group has published sections of contracts which require customers to use its products only for criminal and national security investigations and has stated that it has an industry-leading approach to human rights.[9]

Pegasus was discovered in August 2016 after a failed installation attempt on the iPhone of a human rights activist led to an investigation revealing details about the spyware, its abilities, and the security vulnerabilities it exploited. News of the spyware caused significant media coverage. It was called the "most sophisticated" smartphone attack ever, and was the first time that a malicious remote exploit used jailbreaking to gain unrestricted access to an iPhone.[7]

On August 23, 2020, according to intelligence obtained by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, NSO Group sold Pegasus spyware software for hundreds of millions of US dollars to the United Arab Emirates and the other Gulf States, for surveillance of anti-regime activists, journalists, and political leaders from rival nations, with encouragement and mediation by the Israeli government.[10] Later, in December 2020, the Al Jazeera investigative show The Tip of the Iceberg, Spy partners, exclusively covered Pegasus and its penetration into the phones of media professionals and activists; and its use by Israel to eavesdrop on both opponents and allies.[11][12]

In July 2021, widespread media coverage part of the Project Pegasus revelations along with an in-depth analysis by human rights group Amnesty International uncovered that Pegasus was still being widely used against high-profile targets. It showed that Pegasus was able to infect all modern iOS versions up to iOS 14.6, through a zero-click iMessage exploit.[1]

Discovery[]

Pegasus' iOS exploitation was identified in August 2016. Arab human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor received a text message promising "secrets" about torture happening in prisons in the United Arab Emirates by following a link. Mansoor sent the link to Citizen Lab, who investigated, with the collaboration of , finding that if Mansoor had followed the link it would have jailbroken his phone and implanted the spyware into it, in a form of social engineering.[13] Citizen Lab linked the attack to the NSO Group.

Regarding how widespread the issue was, Lookout explained in a blog post: "We believe that this spyware has been in the wild for a significant amount of time based on some of the indicators within the code" and pointed out that the code shows signs of a "kernel mapping table that has values all the way back to iOS 7" (released 2013).[14] The New York Times and The Times of Israel both reported that it appeared that the United Arab Emirates was using this spyware as early as 2013.[15][16][17] It was used in Panama by former president Ricardo Martinelli from 2012 to 2014, who established the Consejo Nacional de Seguridad (National Security Council) for its use.[18][19][20][21] Several lawsuits outstanding in 2018 claimed that NSO Group helped clients operate the software and therefore participated in numerous violations of human rights initiated by its clients.[17] Two months after the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi human rights activist, in the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz, a Canadian resident, filed suit in Israel against NSO Group, accusing the firm of providing the Saudi government with the surveillance software to spy on him and his friends, including Khashoggi.[3]

Spyware details[]

The spyware can be installed on devices running certain versions of iOS, Apple's mobile operating system, as well as some Android devices.[1] Rather than being a specific exploit, Pegasus is a suite of exploits that uses many vulnerabilities in the system. Infection vectors include clicking links, the Photos app, the Apple Music app, and iMessage. Some of the exploits Pegasus uses are zero-click—that is, they can run without any interaction from the victim. Once installed, Pegasus has been reported to be able to run arbitrary code, extract contacts, call logs, messages, photos, web browsing history, settings,[22] as well as gather information from apps including but not limited to communications apps iMessage, Gmail, Viber, Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Skype.[23]

At the 2017 Security Analyst Summit held by Kaspersky Lab, researchers revealed that Pegasus was available for Android in addition to iOS; Google refers to the Android version as Chrysaor, the brother of the winged horse Pegasus. Its functionality is similar to the iOS version, but the mode of attack is different. The Android version tries to gain root access (similar to jailbreaking in iOS); if it fails, it asks the user for permissions that enable it to harvest at least some data. At the time Google said that only a few Android devices had been infected.[24]

Pegasus hides itself as far as is possible and self-destructs in an attempt to eliminate evidence if unable to communicate with its command-and-control server for more than 60 days, or if on the wrong device. Pegasus also can self-destruct on command.[24]

Pegasus Anonymizing Transmission Network[]

Human rights group Amnesty International reported in the 2021 Project Pegasus revelations that Pegasus employs a sophisticated command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure to deliver exploit payloads and send commands to Pegasus targets. There are at least four known iterations of the C&C infrastructure, dubbed the Pegasus Anonymizing Transmission Network (PATN) by NSO group, each encompassing up to 500 domain names, DNS servers, and other network infrastructure. The PATN reportedly utilizes techniques such as registering high port numbers for their online infrastructure as to avoid conventional Internet scanning. PATN also uses up to three randomised subdomains unique per exploit attempt as well as randomised URL paths.[1]

Use of spyware[]

Although Pegasus is stated as intended to be used against criminals and terrorists,[9] use by authoritarian governments to spy on critics and opponents has often been reported.

Armenia[]

About twenty Armenian citizens were spied on via Pegasus spyware. Media expert Arthur Papyan said it targeted the key figures of the opposition and the government - current and past government employees who knew valuable state secrets and have political influence, including the ex director of the National Security Service and current chairman of the center-right Homeland Party. The local experts suspected that they were targeted either by the government of Armenia of Azerbaijan, or perhaps both. Papyan said that NSO group appears to be jailbreaking a phone and provides interface for viewing the obtained data. Minister of high-tech industry Vahagn Khachaturyan also received a warning letter from Apple, he rejected the theory that the spying party could be the current Armenian government.[25]

Azerbaijan[]

The list of spied-upon citizens included dozens of journalists and activists from Azerbaijan. It was alleged that their mobile phones were tapped.[26] The head of Azerbaijani service of Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe (Azadliq) Jamie Fly expressed his anger when it was revealed that the phones of his five current and former employees were tapped with Pegasus.[27]

Bahrain[]

Researchers at Canada's Citizen Lab revealed the government of Bahrain used the NSO Group's Pegasus to hack activists, bloggers, members of Waad (a secular Bahraini political society), a member of Al Wefaq (a Shiite Bahraini political society), and members of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights. Bahrain reportedly acquired access to spyware in 2017. As per the report, the mobile phones of a total of nine rights activists were “successfully hacked” between June 2020 and February 2021. Those hacked included three members of Waad, three of the BCHR, one of Al Wefaq, and two of the exiled dissidents who reside in London. The Citizen Lab attributed “with high confidence” that a Pegasus operator, LULU, was used by the Bahraini government to breach the phones of at least four of the nine activists.[28][29]

In January 2022, Bahrain was accused of using the Pegasus spyware to hack a human rights defender, Ebtisam al-Saegh. The prominent activist’s phone was hacked at least eight times between August and November 2019. As per the Citizen Lab, following the hacking attempt, al-Saegh faced incidents where she was harassed by the Bahrain authorities. It included being summoned to a police station, interrogation, rape threats, and physical and sexual assault. The attack left the rights defender in a state of “daily fear and terror”.[30]

Hungary[]

In November 2021 Lajos Kósa was the first Hungarian senior official who acknowledged that the country's Interior Ministry purchased and used Pegasus.[31] Government of Viktor Orbán has been accused of using it to spy on members of media as well as on Hungarian opposition months before Lajos Kósa accidentally acknowledged it, saying it's just a simple software.

India[]

Main articles: Pegasus Project revelations in India and WhatsApp snooping scandal

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.[32][33][34]

Phone numbers of Indian ministers, opposition leaders, ex-election commissioners and journalists were allegedly found on a database of NSO hacking targets by Project Pegasus in 2021.[35][36][37]

Independent digital forensic analysis conducted on 10 Indian phones whose numbers were present in the data showed signs of either an attempted or successful Pegasus hack. The results of the forensic analysis threw up shows sequential correlations between the time and date a phone number is entered in the list and the beginning of surveillance. The gap usually ranges between a few minutes and a couple of hours.[38]

11 phone numbers associated with a female employee of the Supreme Court of India and her immediate family, who accused the former Chief Justice of India, Ranjan Gogoi, of sexual harassment, are also allegedly found on a database indicating possibility of their phones being snooped.[39][40]

Records also indicate that phone numbers of some of the key political players in Karnataka appear to have been selected around the time when an intense power struggle was taking place between the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Janata Dal (Secular)-Congress-led state government in 2019.[41][42]

It was claimed that the Indian government used Pegasus to spy on Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan.

Israel[]

See also: NSO_Group § Alleged_widespread_use_by_the_Israeli_police

In January 2022, it was reported that Pegasus was unlawfuly used by the Israeli Police to monitor citizens as well as foreign nationals who were accidentally or intentionally infected by the software.[43] This has led to the announcement of a number of parallel investigations into the police's conduct,[44] with some officials demanding a Commission of inquiry.[45]

Kazakhstan[]

Activists in Kazakhstan were targeted,[46] in addition to top-level officials, like Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, Askar Mamin and Bakytzhan Sagintayev. Among the 2000 targeted Kazak numbers were government critic Bakhytzhan Toregozhina and journalists Serikzhan Mauletbay and Bigeldy Gabdullin.[47][48]

Mexican drug cartels[]

Reversing the intended use against criminals, Pegasus has been used to target and intimidate Mexican journalists by drug cartels and cartel-entwined government actors.[49][50]

Morocco[]

In July 2021, Morocco had targeted more than 6,000 Algerian phones, including those of politicians and high-ranking military officials, with the spyware.[51][52]

Palestine[]

The mobile phones of six Palestinian activists were hacked using Pegasus with some of the attacks reportedly occurring as far back as July 2020, according to a report from Front Line Defenders.[53]

Poland[]

In July 2017, Prime Minister Beata Szydło agreed with her Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu, to buy the Pegasus software.[54] In September that year,  [pl], the vice-minister of justice, requested a parliamentary committee to divert funds from a ministry-run fund to help buy "other services". He also asked the Ministry of Finance to approve 25 million złotys to "combat crime".[55] When the requests were approved, the money was then transferred from Woś's ministry to the Central Anticorruption Bureau (CBA), which was then used to buy the spyware, worth a total of 33.4 million PLN.[56][57] The acquisition was camouflaged so that neither the parliamentary committee nor the ministry subordinates were aware of the nature of the transaction.[55] Pegasus was first deployed in mid-November 2017.[56]

Already in 2018, the Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto suspected that an operator codenamed ORZELBIALY (Polish for "white eagle") was spreading Pegasus through cell network operators.[58] A year later, TVN24 reported, basing on the results of the Supreme Audit Office investigation, that the invoice with which the spyware was bought could have been Pegasus but could not confirm it.[59] The following year, Rzeczpospolita found that the bulk of evidence in a corruption case against Sławomir Nowak was obtained using Pegasus. CBA denied it had ever bought such software and the government assured it had got permission from a court;[60] the government separately dismissed suspicions of the Polish Ombudsman regarding the acquisition of the software.[61]

The first cases where Pegasus was confirmed to be used surfaced in December 2021, when the Citizen Lab announced that Pegasus was used against lawyer Roman Giertych and prosecutor Ewa Wrzosek, both critical of the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) government, with Giertych's phone suffering eighteen intrusions of the software.[62] Slightly later, 33 hacking instances of the phone of Krzysztof Brejza, a senator from the opposition Civic Platform (PO), were also uncovered[63] and independently confirmed by Amnesty International.[64] His phone messages were stolen just prior to the 2019 European and Polish parliamentary elections, during which Brejza was heading the opposition parties' campaign; the texts were then doctored by state-run media, notably TVP, and used in a smear campaign against the opposition parties.[64][65][66] Just before these revelations, Poland was struck out from the list of countries authorised to buy the spyware.[67]

Saudi Arabia[]

Pegasus software, whose sales are licensed by the government of Israel to foreign governments, helped Saudi Arabia spy on Jamal Kashoggi,[68] who was later killed in Turkey.

Pegasus was also used to spy on Jeff Bezos after Mohammed bin Salman, the crown-prince of Saudi Arabia, exchanged messages with him that exploited then-unknown vulnerabilities in WhatsApp.[69][70]

A New York Times correspondent covering the Middle East, Ben Hubbard revealed in October 2021 that Saudi Arabia used the NSO Group’s Pegasus software to hack into his phone. The investigations revealed that the journalist was targeted repeatedly between June 2018 to June 2021. Hubbard was possibly targeted for writing a book about the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and for his involvement in revealing the UAE’s hacking and surveillance attempt of Project Raven. Saudi attempted to peek into Hubbard’s personal information twice in 2018, one through a suspicious text message and the other through an Arabic WhatsApp message inviting him to a protest in Washington. Two other attacks were launched against him in 2020 and 2021 using the “zero-click” hacking capabilities. A senior member at Citizen Lab, Bill Marczak said in “high confidence” that the four attacks were attempted using the Pegasus software.[71][72]

Uganda[]

It has been reported that Muhoozi Kainerugaba brokered a deal to use Pegasus in Uganda, paying between $10 and $20 million in 2019. The software was later used to hack the phones of 11 US diplomats and employees of the US embassy in Uganda some time during 2021.[73]

United Arab Emirates[]

The United Arab Emirates used Pegasus to spy on the members of Saudi-backed Yemeni government according to an investigation published in July 2021. The UAE used the spyware to monitor and spy on the ministers of the internationally recognised government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, including Yemeni president and his family members, former Prime Minister Ahmed Obaid Bin Dagher, former Foreign Minister Abdulmalik Al-Mekhlafi, and current Minister of Youth and Sports, Nayef al-Bakri.[74]

On 24 September 2021, The Guardian reported that the telephone of Alaa al-Siddiq, executive director of ALQST, who died in a car accident in London on 20 June 2021, was infected with the Pegasus spyware for 5 years until 2020. The researchers at the Citizen Lab confirmed that the Emirati activist was hacked by a government client of Israel's NSO Group. The case represented a worrying trend for activists and dissidents, who escaped the UAE to live in the relative safety, but were never out of the reach of Pegasus.[75]

On October 2021, the British High Court ruled that agents of Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum used Pegasus to hack the phones of his (ex)-wife, Princess Haya bint Hussein, her solicitors, a personal assistant and two members of her security team in the summer of 2020. The court ruled that the agents acted "with the express or implied authority" of the sheikh; he denied knowledge of the hacking. The judgment referred to the hacking as "serial breaches of (UK) domestic criminal law", "in violation of fundamental common law and ECHR rights", "interference with the process of this court and the mother's access to justice" and "abuse of power" by a head of state. NSO had contacted an intermediary in August 2020 to inform Princess Haya of the hack and is believed to have terminated its contract with the UAE.[76]

On 7 October 2021, the NSO Group stated that it had terminated its contract with the UAE to use its Pegasus spyware tool after the ruling by UK’s High Court that Dubai’s ruler misused the firm’s Pegasus software to spy on his ex-wife and her legal advisers.[77]

United States[]

Pegasus spyware was found[when?] on the iPhones of at least nine U.S. State Department employees.[78] The US government blacklisted the NSO Group to stop what it called "transnational repression".[79]

Project Pegasus revelations[]

Main article: Project Pegasus (investigation)

A leak of a list of more than 50,000 telephone numbers believed to have been identified as those of people of interest by clients of NSO since 2016 became available to Paris-based media nonprofit organisation Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International. They shared the information with seventeen news media organisations in what has been called "Project Pegasus", and a months-long investigation was carried out, which reported from mid-July 2021. The Pegasus Project involved 80 journalists from the media partners: The Guardian (UK), Radio France and Le Monde (France), Die Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung (Germany), The Washington Post (United States), Haaretz/TheMarker (Israel), Aristegui Noticias, Proceso, OCCRP, Knack, Le Soir, The Wire (India),[80] Daraj,[81] (Hungary),[82] and PBS Frontline.[83] Evidence was found that many phones with numbers in the list had been targets of Pegasus spyware.[9][84] However, The CEO of NSO Group categorically claimed that the list in question is unrelated to them, the source of the allegations can't be verified as reliable one. "This is an attempt to build something on a crazy lack of information...There is something fundamentally wrong with this investigation".[85]

French intelligence (ANSSI) confirmed that Pegasus spyware had been found on the phones of three journalists, including a journalist of France 24, in what was the first time an independent and official authority corroborated the findings of the investigation.[86]

Vulnerabilities[]

Lookout provided details of the three iOS vulnerabilities:[14]

  • CVE-2016-4655: Information leak in kernel – A kernel base mapping vulnerability that leaks information to the attacker allowing them to calculate the kernel's location in memory.
  • CVE-2016-4656: Kernel memory corruption leads to jailbreak – 32 and 64 bit iOS kernel-level vulnerabilities that allow the attacker to secretly jailbreak the device and install surveillance software – details in reference.[87]
  • CVE-2016-4657: Memory corruption in the webkit – A vulnerability in the Safari WebKit that allows the attacker to compromise the device when the user clicks on a link.

Google's Project Zero documented another exploit, dubbed FORCEDENTRY, in December 2021. According to Google's researchers, Pegasus sent an iMessage to its targets that contained what appeared to be GIF images, but which in fact contained a JBIG2 image. A vulnerability in the Xpdf implementation of JBIG2, re-used in Apple's iOS phone operating software, allowed Pegasus to construct an emulated computer architecture inside the JBIG2 stream which was then used to implement the zero-click attack. Apple fixed the vulnerability in iOS 14.8 in September 2021 as CVE-2021-30860.[88]

As of July 2021, Pegasus likely uses many exploits, some not listed in the above CVEs.[1]

Reactions[]

Media[]

News of the spyware received significant media attention,[22][89][90][91][92] particularly for being called the "most sophisticated" smartphone attack ever,[93][94] and, for being the first detection of a remote Apple jailbreak exploit.[95]

NSO Group comment[]

Dan Tynant of The Guardian wrote an August 2016 article that featured comments from NSO Group, where they stated that they provide "authorized governments with technology that helps them combat terror and crime", although the Group told him that they had no knowledge of any incidents.[96]

Bug-bounty program skepticism[]

In the aftermath of the news, critics asserted that Apple's bug-bounty program, which rewards people for finding flaws in its software, might not have offered sufficient rewards to prevent exploits being sold on the black market, rather than being reported back to Apple. Russell Brandom of The Verge commented that the reward offered in Apple's bug-bounty program maxes out at $200,000, "just a fraction of the millions that are regularly spent for iOS exploits on the black market". He goes on to ask why Apple doesn't "spend its way out of security vulnerabilities?", but also writes that "as soon as [the Pegasus] vulnerabilities were reported, Apple patched them—but there are plenty of other bugs left. While spyware companies see an exploit purchase as a one-time payout for years of access, Apple's bounty has to be paid out every time a new vulnerability pops up." Brandom also wrote; "The same researchers participating in Apple's bug bounty could make more money selling the same finds to an exploit broker." He concluded the article by writing; "It's hard to say how much damage might have been caused if Mansoor had clicked on the spyware link... The hope is that, when the next researcher finds the next bug, that thought matters more than the money."[97]

See also[]

References[]

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