Governments must impose a global moratorium on the international spyware trade or face a world in which no mobile phone is safe from state-sponsored hackers, Edward Snowden has warned in the wake of revelations about the clients of NSO Group.

Snowden, who in 2013 blew the whistle on the secret mass surveillance programmes of the US National Security Agency, described for-profit malware developers as “an industry that should not exist”.

He made the comments in an interview with the Guardian after the first revelations from the Pegasus project, a journalistic investigation by a consortium of international media organisations into the NSO Group and its clients.

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For traditional police operations to plant bugs or wiretap a suspect’s phone, law enforcement would need to “break into somebody’s house, or go to their car, or go to their office, and we’d like to think they’ll probably get a warrant”, he said.

But commercial spyware made it cost-efficient for targeted surveillance against vastly more people. “If they can do the same thing from a distance, with little cost and no risk, they begin to do it all the time, against everyone who’s even marginally of interest,” he said.

“If you don’t do anything to stop the sale of this technology, it’s not just going to be 50,000 targets. It’s going to be 50 million targets, and it’s going to happen much more quickly than any of us expect.”

Part of the problem arose from the fact that different people’s mobile phones were functionally identical to one another, he said. “When we’re talking about something like an iPhone, they’re all running the same software around the world. So if they find a way to hack one iPhone, they’ve found a way to hack all of them.”

He compared companies commercialising vulnerabilities in widely used mobile phone models to an industry of “infectioneers” deliberately trying to develop new strains of disease.

“It’s like an industry where the only thing they did was create custom variants of Covid to dodge vaccines,” he said. “Their only products are infection vectors. They’re not security products. They’re not providing any kind of protection, any kind of prophylactic. They don’t make vaccines – the only thing they sell is the virus.”

Snowden said commercial malware such as Pegasus was so powerful that ordinary people could in effect do nothing to stop it. Asked how people could protect themselves, he said: “What can people do to protect themselves from nuclear weapons?

“There are certain industries, certain sectors, from which there is no protection, and that’s why we try to limit the proliferation of these technologies. We don’t allow a commercial market in nuclear weapons.”

He said the only viable solution to the threat of commercial malware was an international moratorium on its sale. “What the Pegasus project reveals is the NSO Group is really representative of a new malware market, where this is a for-profit business,” he said. “The only reason NSO is doing this is not to save the world, it’s to make money.”

He said a global ban on the trade in infection vectors would prevent commercial abuse of vulnerabilities in mobile phones, while still allowing researchers to identify and fix them.

“The solution here for ordinary people is to work collectively. This is not a problem that we want to try and solve individually, because it’s you versus a billion dollar company,” he said. “If you want to protect yourself you have to change the game, and the way we do that is by ending this trade.”

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Source: Edward Snowden calls for spyware trade ban amid Pegasus revelations | Edward Snowden | The Guardian

The revelation that our government might be using spyware called Pegasus to hack into its critics’ phones has started a whole new debate on privacy. The opposition is taking a dig at the ruling party every chance it gets, while the latter is trying to damage control after facing such serious allegations.

Amidst the chaos, one of the members of The Pegasus Project, Amnesty, recently made a public toolkit that can check if your phone is infected with Pegasus. The toolkit, known as MVT, requires users to know their way around the command line.

In a previous post, we wrote about how it works and successfully traces signs of Pegasus. Moreover, we mentioned how MVT is more effective on iOS than Android (the most you can do is scan APKs and SMSes). Hence, in this guide, we’re focusing on breaking down the process to detect Pegasus on iPhone into a step-by-step guide.

First off, you’ll need to create an encrypted backup and transfer it to either a Mac or PC. You can also do this on Linux instead, but you’ll have to install libimobiledevice beforehand for that.

Once the phone backup is transferred, you need to download Python 3.6 (or newer) on your system — if you don’t have it already. Here’s how you can install the same for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

After that, go through Amnesty’s manual to install MVT correctly on your system. Installing MVT will give you new utilities (mvt-ios and mvt-android) that you can use in the Python command line.

Now, let’s go through the steps for detecting Pegasus on an iPhone backup using MVT.

Steps To Detect Pegasus On iPhone

First of all, you have to decrypt your data backup. To do that, you’ll need to enter the following instruction format while replacing the placeholder text (marked with a forward slash) with your custom path.

mvt-ios decrypt-backup -p password -d /decrypted /backup

Note: Replace “/decrypted” with the directory where you want to store the decrypted backup and “/backup” with the directory where your encrypted backup is located.

Now, we will run a scan on the decrypted backup, referencing it with the latest IOCs (possible signs of Pegasus spyware), and store the result in an output folder.

To do this, first, download the newest IOCs from here (use the folder with the latest timestamp). Then, enter the instruction format as given below with your custom directory path.

mvt-ios check-backup -o /output -i /pegasus.stix2 /backup

Note: Replace “/output” with the directory where you want to store the scan result, “/backup” with the path where your decrypted backup is stored, and “/pegasus.stix2” with the path where you downloaded the latest IOCs.

After the scan completion, MVT will generate JSON files in the specified output folder. If there is a JSON file with the suffix “_detected,” then that means your iPhone data is most likely Pegasus-infected.

However, the IOCs are regularly updated by Amnesty’s team as they develop a better understanding of how Pegasus operates. So, you might want to keep running scans as the IOCs are updated to make sure there are no false positives.

Source: How To Check If Your Phone Is Infected With Pegasus Using MVT

Billions of people are inseparable from their phones. Their devices are within reach – and earshot – for almost every daily experience, from the most mundane to the most intimate.

Few pause to think that their phones can be transformed into surveillance devices, with someone thousands of miles away silently extracting their messages, photos and location, activating their microphone to record them in real time.

Such are the capabilities of Pegasus, the spyware manufactured by NSO Group, the Israeli purveyor of weapons of mass surveillance.

NSO rejects this label. It insists only carefully vetted government intelligence and law enforcement agencies can use Pegasus, and only to penetrate the phones of “legitimate criminal or terror group targets”.

Yet in the coming days the Guardian will be revealing the identities of many innocent people who have been identified as candidates for possible surveillance by NSO clients in a massive leak of data.

Without forensics on their devices, we cannot know whether governments successfully targeted these people. But the presence of their names on this list indicates the lengths to which governments may go to spy on critics, rivals and opponents.

First we reveal how journalists across the world were selected as potential targets by these clients prior to a possible hack using NSO surveillance tools.

Over the coming week we will be revealing the identities of more people whose phone numbers appear in the leak. They include lawyers, human rights defenders, religious figures, academics, businesspeople, diplomats, senior government officials and heads of state.

Our reporting is rooted in the public interest. We believe the public should know that NSO’s technology is being abused by the governments who license and operate its spyware. But we also believe it is in the public interest to reveal how governments look to spy on their citizens and how seemingly benign processes such as HLR lookups can be exploited in this environment.

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Companies such as NSO operate in a market that is almost entirely unregulated, enabling tools that can be used as instruments of repression for authoritarian regimes such as those in Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan.

The market for NSO-style surveillance-on-demand services has boomed post-Snowden, whose revelations prompted the mass adoption of encryption across the internet. As a result the internet became far more secure, and mass harvesting of communications much more difficult.

But that in turn spurred the proliferation of companies such as NSO offering solutions to governments struggling to intercept messages, emails and calls in transit. The NSO answer was to bypass encryption by hacking devices.

Two years ago the then UN special rapporteur on freedom of expression, David Kaye, called for a moratorium on the sale of NSO-style spyware to governments until viable export controls could be put in place. He warned of an industry that seemed “out of control, unaccountable and unconstrained in providing governments with relatively low-cost access to the sorts of spying tools that only the most advanced state intelligence services were previously able to use”.

His warnings were ignored. The sale of surveillance continued unabated. That GCHQ-like surveillance tools are now available for purchase by repressive governments may give some of Snowden’s critics pause for thought.

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Source: Huge data leak shatters the lie that the innocent need not fear surveillance | Surveillance | The Guardian