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Its advertising message innocently reads:
"World's foremost phone monitoring application designed to help you ensure your child's and your smartphone's safety."
A sweeping investigation conducted by 17 media outlets discovered that the NSO Group’s Pegasus software was used to hack into 37 smartphones belonging to human rights activists and journalists.
The phones were on a leaked list of numbers discovered by Paris journalism non-profit Hidden Stories and human rights group Amnesty International. The numbers on the list were singled out for possible surveillance by countries who are clients of NSO, which markets its spyware to governments to track their own citizens for potential terrorists and criminals.
Rich parents use the Pegasus spyware to spy on their children's activities and contacts in school.
MNCs and big private companies use the Pegasus spyware to spy on their employees.
Armed Forces use the Pegasus spyware to spy on their officers and soldiers.
COVID-19 Pandemic Task Forces around the world use the Pegasus spyware to trace potentially infected persons, by changing its name Pegasus to something else, eg TraceTogether.
Pegasus can extract all of a mobile device’s data, and activate the device’s microphone to listen in on conversations surreptitiously and secretly without the knowledge and permission of the owner.
The list of hacked journalists dates back to 2016 and includes reporters from the Post, CNN, the Associated Press, Voice of America, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, Le Monde, the Financial Times, and Al Jazeera.
In a statement emailed to The Verge on Sunday, the NSO spokesperson denied the claims.
“After checking their claims, we firmly deny the false allegations made in their report,” the statement continues.
The company is considering a defamation lawsuit, because it says “these allegations are so outrageous and far from reality.” This is understandable.
It would be exciting if the company really sues the 17 news outlets. Then more details can be obtained from NSO on its links with the Israeli government and intelligence organisations, as well as their modus operandi. At the very most the 17 news outlets might lose some money. However, the additional information obtained during the court proceedings from NSO would be immensely valuable for the whole World.
It’s not the first time NSO’s Pegasus spyware has been accused of being part of a globalised surveillance mission.
Between July and August 2020, the research organization "Citizen Lab" discovered that 36 phones belonging to Al Jazeera journalists had been hacked using the Pegasus technology, by hackers working for governments in the Middle East.
In 2019, WhatsApp sued the NSO Group, claiming that the Pegasus spyware was used to hack into users of WhatsApp’s Chat Service.
You should do more research into the Pegasus spyware and the NSO Group, and then draw your own conclusions.
SSO.
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World Wide Internet Outage Hits Numerous Major Websites
Many popular websites fell offline on Thursday in a widespread global outage of internet service.
Visitors attempting to reach certain sites received DNS errors, meaning their requests could not reach the websites.
Affected services included Airbnb, UPS, HSBC bank, British Airways and the PlayStation network used for online games.
One popular DNS provider, Akamai, reported "an emerging issue" with its Edge DNS service.
Internet outage monitoring platform DownDetector had reported thousands of problems from its users across dozens o platforms.
Previously it said the issue had been a "partial outage" - and some users reported being able to access some compromised services in different regions.
As some websites began to appear again for users in Europe and the US, others in Asian nations continued to report problems.
DNS - short for Domain Name System - turns the human-readable web addresses we use, such as bbc.com, into addresses that point to a computer server somewhere online.
Disruptions often mean that a web browser cannot find the content it is looking for.
Other affected services reported by DownDetector included:
Banks such as Barclays, Lloyds, TSB, and Halifax.
Gaming services including Steam, Call of Duty, and EA.
Streaming services on Channel 4 and ITV.
It is the second such widespread outage in two months.
In June, cloud computing provider Fastly had an interrupted service which took down a large number of high-profile websites around the world, including many international newspapers and government websites.
In that case, it later emerged that a settings change by one customer had inadvertently affected the entire infrastructure. This is not a joke!
US accuse China of hacking but say nothing about Pegasus to deflect attention
42 million malicious programs detected targeting China in 2020, mostly from US and India
Many has condemned the US government on Thursday for turning a blind eye toward Israel's Pegasus spyware, while opting to smear China over the issue of cybersecurity with unwarranted charges.
The strong condemnation came after unusually broad collusion among Western powers to publicly blame China for cyberattacks. Those participating included the US, the EU, Australia, Britain, Canada, Japan, and New Zealand.
Pegasus spyware, developed by the Israeli firm NSO Group, could be covertly installed on mobile phones without the awareness of phone users. It is reported that the spyware targets politicians, journalists and businesspeople around the world.
The Pegasus spyware case once again demonstrates that cybersecurity is a common threat that challenges all countries around the world. Countries should join hands to cope with threats through dialogue on the basis of mutual respect and equality, but surprisingly, the US government, which always talks about safeguarding cybersecurity, has remained silent over the spyware. Instead, the US is busy ganging up with its allies to slander and smear China with unwarranted charges, which reflected its guilty conscience.
The US government was pretending to be blind to the Pegasus spyware, which was exposed as undertaking surveillance of politicians, journalists and business people, and some Chinese diplomats were among the victims, media reports showed.
The facts show that China has been a major victim of cyberattacks. China captured more than 42 million malicious program samples in 2020. The overseas sources of these malicious program samples were mainly the US, India and etc, the National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China (CNCERT/CC) said on Wednesday.
About 55.41 million IP addresses in China were attacked by malicious programs, accounting for 14.2 percent of all IP addresses in the country. The attacked IP addresses were mainly based in East China's Shandong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang provinces, and South China's Guangdong Province, the report said.
Chinese tech giant 360 Security Technology said that the hacking group APT-C-39, which belongs to the CIA, was found to have been launching a series of attacks against China's aerospace and scientific research institutions, the petroleum industry and large-scale internet companies for over a decade. It caused great damage to China's national security and key infrastructure and personal information security.
The 360 Security Technology captured more than 2,700 attacks launched by 44 APT hacking groups from overseas, affecting 20,000 government departments and scientific research institutions.
They flew their spy planes daily along Chinese coast and in the South China Sea.
At one time, they blatantly flew their U2 spy planes all over China until the Chinese were able to shoot them down. They stopped after that.
The treacherous Americans have been spying on everyone, including their allies, and hacking at every country's computer systems and stealing secret information.
They got the cheek to attack China about this? And as usual the silly American cronies would go along and sing along.
If this revelation is a surprise, the whole world must be sleeping. If you believe that there is any credibility of the USA in their accusation against China of global cyber espionage, you must be sleeping as well. Of course the tail waggers will believe the narrative.
The biggest player in the global cyber espionage is the USA and they have been at it for decades. Does the spying on Merkel and Macron not tell us anything sinister? It is as if this has never happen and accusing China will make them holier than thou. What hypocrites!
In any case, what people are holding in their hands already makes them a target of surveillance. When they walk outside, they are already being watched. Of course the one doing the surveillance will deny and say the information will not be used for unlawful purpose. It is all for security reasons, to keep everybody safe. All bullshit.
Every single handphone and computer is being tracked, monitored and spied upon by many spying agents, agencies, government organisations, business enterprises and hackers everywhere, every day, every second. No one is spared.
The biggest culprits are Facebook, Google, Microsoft, the US Government, CIA, MI6, Israeli Intelligence and all the Information and Intelligence gathering organisations in the world.
Yet people go about as if nothing is amiss. The thing is this business of spying has been going on quietly and discreetly under the radar, the perpetrator knowing that no one realises it's lingering presence.
When it becomes widely exposed, the harm is already done and you are trapped and cannot live without it and have to take it as something you have to live with. Crying foul is too little too late.
Just like the election laws and CPF rules in Red Dot. Slowly and discreetly they changed it nibble by nibble until people have no means to take issue with it, the realisation only surfaces when they are affected or others who were affected highlighted it..
Your smartphone is worse than a spy in your pocket, so says Edward Snowden.
But hundreds of millions are living happily with it and cannot do without it.
China is more advanced than that. They could fly their drones carrying cans of soap powder would be enough to scare the shit out of the Americans. They would think it is the same deadly chemical weapon Colin Powell carried to the UN.
The mother of all jokes is that they bombed a milk powder factory in Iraq claiming it was a facility for making chemical weapons. How could a super power claiming to have the best intelligence in the whole world be unaware that that was a milk powder factory?
Oh yes, how could they bombed the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, claiming they relied on outdated maps when they had the world's most up to date intelligence that relies on outdated maps?
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