Israeli firm makes headlines about its spyware Pegasus

NSO an Israeli spyware firm is repeatedly making prominent media stories, current year, with the latest during May as its spyware called Pagasus performed a major hack into WhatsApp so nation-states could attack particular individuals' mobile phones via installation of the software when both Android as well as iPhone devices carried out voice calls irrespective of the user replying a contaminated call.

The Financial Times was first to report the hack, with the newspaper still investigating while its July 19 publication reports about the firm claiming to undertake its product's sales. www.forbes.com posted this, July 19, 2019.

Headquartered in London, FT reported NSO as telling buyers that it possessed a special kind of technology capable of secretly capturing a person's entire data stored with Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.

However, soon after the publication of the report, a spokesperson from NSO said that the newspaper was short of knowing the exact thing. Actually, NSO's products weren't designed for the access and garnering capabilities from cloud applications, infrastructures and services that the newspaper article suggested.

According to the article, a contaminated phone enables the NSO spyware get keys to authenticate cloud services, notably iCloud, Facebook Messenger and Google Drive that the device accesses. Further, considering that smart-phones can now be used as a means to enter the cloud-based environment, this is set to induce grave concerns. The newspaper refers to a sales document to assert this can be carried out devoid of asking for dual-factor validation alternatively issuing an alert e-mail on the host mobile.

A document on a particular sales pitch from Q-Cyber the parent company of NSO that was readied to initiate the spyware's sale to Uganda's government promoted Pegasus' ability for getting back the keys which would unlock cloud vaults as well as sync-and-pull out data without help.

FT reports Amazon as asserting absence of any clue about the kind of hack making inroads into its systems rather confirmed -like Facebook- of checking the assertions. Apple along with Microsoft got back with confirmations of the steadily created security mechanisms pertaining to their platforms, while there was nil comment from Google.

» SPAMfighter News - 7/30/2019