Pegasus

All right.

NSO group, by the way, that's Pegasus and Toca.

That's spyware.

The company also represents the democratic wing of the Israeli propaganda apparatus, targeting the liberal and progressive American audience with a different discourse from the conservative one, focusing on shared values and democracy between America and Israel as we fund the bombs and the concentration camps that get Palestinians rounded up for being Palestinian without charge.

Other distinguishing features might relate to commercial spyware's covertness and its intrusiveness.

So aside from accessing your communications, which a wiretap might be able to do, commercial spyware like Pegasus, the notorious spyware sold by the Israeli firm NSO Group, has reportedly been able to do much more.

So it can access a calendar, it can access your contacts, it can also activate camera, microphone to enable live surveillance.

So very personal data and information that would be stored on a modern day mobile phone.

And so I think is helpful in visualizing this is really civil society and human rights experts have called it this kind of system that turns mobile phones or targeted devices into 24 hour surveillance devices or the informant in your pocket.

It's incredibly intrusive and arguably it's potentially also more covert than pre-existing tools.

So covert spyware like Pegasus, you know, it really can infect your phone without you needing to do anything at all.

And that means you don't need to click a phishing link and you have no way of often knowing that this spyware is on your device.

But harder doesn't mean impossible.

Pegasus is the famous example.

The NSO group spyware that targets iOS via zero-click exploits.

Zero-click means the victim doesn't have to tap anything.

The attack surface exists.

It's just a question of who's willing to pay for the exploit.

Pegasus is a good reminder that lockdown is a statement about the cost of attack, not the possibility of attack.

If someone spends millions of dollars on a zero-click exploit chain, they're not doing it to steal your Netflix password.

Yeah, 100%.

Uh, we've seen Pegasus and another, uh, spyware variant called NovaSpy, uh, pop up on the devices of Serbian activists.

This, uh, I think 14 people, uh, in total, according to the Citizen Lab, uh, and this has included a member of parliament and whatnot.

The European, uh, some members of the European Parliament have called to, uh, for the, for a slowdown in, uh, Serbia's, uh, entry to the EU over this, so it has actually turned into a pretty bi- big political issue.

So yeah, that's like someone gets your phone and opens it, or tries to open it, right? Then I would say the top of the pyramid is what we call, these are very exotic attacks, right? The zero-click exploits? Zero-click Trojan horse exploits.

Pegasus is the most famous

of these.

Pegasus came out like 10, 12 years ago, right? Or we learned about it 10, 12 years ago.

What are they working on now?

My business partner was actually...

So he was designing a software to enable customer service.

And a couple of his friends from 8200, the electronics warfare unit, were like, oh, that's a cool idea because it's an app that needs to get these special permissions to do all the stuff on the phone.

29 EU parliamentarians have called for the bloc to suspend Serbia's EU membership application over its repeated spyware abuse.

Multiple reports have blamed the government of using Nova Spy and Pegasus spyware against student protesters, journalists, and political activists.

French authorities have arrested two people suspected of hacking the country's tax agency last month.

The first suspect was arrested on August 18, the day after the hack became public.

All those declarations happened before he left the office in the first term.

And then Spain, their prime minister, his phone was spied on, was hacked by Morocco using Israeli Pegasus software, and they got a lot of compromising materials.

Forced him, I don't want to absolve him of any responsibility.

Spain is complicit 100%, but It could be one of the explanations why he accepted such compromise.