British academic: Notorious Pegasus program faces Judgment Day

British writer and academic John Naughton said the infamous Pegasus spyware program developed by the Israeli company "NSO" (NSO) is currently facing its day of judgment, and is at the center of many international lawsuits thanks to a brave Canadian research laboratory.

Naughton is Professor of Public Understanding of Technology at the Open University in Britain and author of "From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: What You Really Need to Know About the Internet", he mentioned that this Israeli company developing the program that few people have heard of comes - which is really surprising - on Top of the list of the most toxic technology companies in the world.

The open encyclopedia Wikipedia defines it as an Israeli technology company known primarily for its proprietary Pegasus software capable of "monitoring smartphones remotely without a single click".

In an article in the Guardian newspaper, Naughton confirms that most smartphone users assume that the hacker's ability to hack their devices depends on their negligence or their naive behavior such as clicking on a web link or opening an attachment, but the Israeli program can access the phones. The person does not do anything undesirable, and once inside it turns everything on the device into an open book for any malware publisher.

This is really impressive, but the other thing worth noting is that the software is also able to infect relatively secure iPhones that are often the phones of choice for politicians, investigative journalists, human rights activists and dissidents in authoritarian countries.

Also, Pegasus - the writer adds - is so powerful that it is classified as "ammunition", so it requires permission from the Israeli government before selling it to foreign customers who must be - apparently - governments since it is not available as a consumer product, at a time when it insists The Israeli government designates it exclusively for use against criminals and terrorists.

Evidence indicates that Pegasus was used in attacks targeting human rights activists and journalists in different countries, and was used to spy against a country, Pakistan.

Until very recently - the writer adds - the Israeli developer was moving forward at a steady pace, but things began to change at the beginning of this month when the administration of US President Joe Biden added it to the black list "that works against national interests, American national security and human rights in the world", and banned Actually sell hardware and software to it.

Last week, Apple filed a lawsuit against NSO to hold it accountable for monitoring and targeting its users, and is also seeking a permanent injunction to ban the Israeli company from using any of its software, services or devices.

missing link

But the missing link in covering these developments, according to Naughton, is that none of these things would have happened without the skill, dedication and perseverance of an exceptional group of academic researchers at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, Canada. .

A laboratory was set up at this college in 2001 by Ronald Deebert, a political scientist who realized early on that the world would need some way of digging beneath the surface of our global communications networks to reveal the ways in which power was secretly exercised.

And over the last 20 years, Debert has put together a tremendous team that somehow operates as a kind of NSA for civil society, and that's been the only place for years where one can get an informed picture of what NSO has been doing, but from Without the work of this laboratory and the courage of some of its personal researchers, the United States would not likely have moved against the Israeli company.

Tonon concludes that even if the Israeli company slides to the brink of bankruptcy, the Pegasus program that it developed will not disappear because there are many non-democratic customers who will seek to benefit from its capabilities, and what the Citizen Lab has shown to Debert and his colleagues is that the price of freedom will always remain technological vigilance.