What is Pegasus, and How Does it Spy on You?
A piece of malware called Pegasus is allowing governments around the world to spy on people by turning their smartphones into fully-fledged civilian devices that can record audio, video, and photos. Pegasus does not come cheap. If you want to use it as a government, you need to pay millions of dollars to get your hands on it.
Security-related bugs exist everywhere. They exist on Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, and macOS. Once you can breach the security, then you have unauthorized access to things that you shouldn’t have access to. Google paid out 6.7 million dollars to people who had found different security errors in Android Chrome in 2020. There are more bugs than there are security researchers, and there are some professional researchers who spend their time trying to crack into a lot of these bugs.
Pegasus is a group that finds weaknesses in Android devices and iOS devices and then is able to worm its way into those devices and then bypasses the normal security by bypassing the normal checks that Apple and Google have inside their operating systems. It’s able to kind of secrete itself in there and then start its spying activities, and it will open up a network connection back to a server somewhere that’s passing back the photos and audio recordings.
How to protect yourself from Pegasus?
Do not click on suspicious links. If you do get tempted, don’t look at it and think, well, maybe it’s okay if there’s even a tiny doubt in your mind, but why did you suddenly get that message about this parcel that hasn’t been delivered or this thing to do with your bank that you didn’t know anything about? If you do click, just delete the message. If it’s important, you will be contacted another way, by phone or by letter or whatever.
Don’t click on the link if you’re looking for something that is not what you are looking for. Do not send money to someone you don’t know because they may have no idea who you are talking to. If you are using an Android device or you’re using an iPhone that’s been jailbroken, do not install third-party apps because you don’t know what you’re getting.
There is no guarantee, no way of checking that what you click on and download is actually the genuine thing. It’s most likely got some kind of malware in it. In the worst case, it could have something as sophisticated as a pegasus in it, which is also being used by state-sponsored surveillance groups to spy on people in China.
