Israeli spyware developer NSO has shocked the global security community for years with powerful and effective hacking tools that can target Android and iOS devices.

There is no doubt that the company's products have been so misused by its customers around the world that the Israeli company is now facing serious penalties and lawsuits that threaten its future.

But a new analysis from Google about the exploitation of the Israeli company's ForcedEntry iOS technology, which has been used in a number of attacks against activists, dissidents and journalists this year, comes with an important caveat: "Private companies can produce Hacking tools are more sophisticated and sophisticated than elite government-backed spy groups.”

Google's Project Zero Bug-Hunting group analyzed Forced Entry technology using a sample provided by researchers at Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

What is a "forced entry" or "zero click"?

Over the past year, there has been a surge in attacks using forced entry technology, which is a non-reactive attack, which means that victims do not need to click on a link or grant permission for a hack to occur.

Project Zero has found that the technology used a series of clever tactics to target Apple's iMessage platform, bypassing the protections the company had added in recent years to make such attacks more difficult, and facilitating the installation of the Pegasus spyware. (Pegasus) of the Israeli company.

Apple released a series of updates in September and October that mitigated the Forced Entry attack and strengthened iMessage against similar future attacks.

But the Project Zero researchers write in their analysis that the Forced Entry vulnerability remains "one of the most critical technical vulnerabilities we've ever seen."

Project Zero believes that the NSO Group has achieved by inventing this vulnerability a level of innovation that they say is limited to a small cadre of major country hackers.

Project Zero added that “we have not previously seen an exploit of such a limited vulnerability that builds a massive penetration capability, without the need for any interaction with the attacker’s server, without downloading malware or a similar scripting engine on the victim’s machine, etc.”

Project Zero researchers see the Forced Entry vulnerability as one of the most dangerous technical vulnerabilities (Getty Images)

What is the role of technology companies in protecting users?

Apple added protection for iMessage in iOS 14 for 2020, called BlastDoor, following an earlier report about the threat of “zero-click” attacks.

Ian Beer and Samuel Gross of the Zero Project say that Blastdoor has made Forced Entry's attacks on iMessage more difficult.

They told WIRED that "making attackers suffer and take more risks is part of the plan to help discourage [Forced Entry] attacks."

Forced Entry takes advantage of vulnerabilities in how it accepts messages in iMessage and classifies files to trick the system into opening a malicious PDF without the victim doing anything at all.

The attack exploited a vulnerability in an outdated technology compression tool used to process text in images, enabling NSO customers to take over the entire iPhone.

Unfortunately, the old algorithms of the 1990s are still used for file compression and scanning, even in modern communications applications, despite all their flaws.

"Project Zero" researchers: The ability of "NSO" software to install itself and operate in a very terrifying alien environment (Reuters)

scary tactics

This is not the only development made by the Israeli company, while many security attacks require a so-called command and control server to send the hacker's instructions to the successfully placed malware, Forced Entry is its own virtual environment.

The entire attack infrastructure can establish itself and operate within an exotic environment such as iMessage, making the attack more difficult to detect.

In their analysis, Project Zero researchers consider that this matter in itself is very terrifying.

The detailed technical explanation in the "Project Zero" report is very important not only because it explains in detail how "Forced Entry" works, but because it reveals the severity of malware developed by technology companies.

"These technical capabilities are owned by a developed country," says John Scott Railton, senior researcher at Citizen Lab.

"It's cutting-edge stuff, and when it's available in the market and it gets to a despot, with no controls, it's absolutely terrifying. It just makes you wonder what other things are currently in use and waiting to be discovered. And if that's the kind of technical threat to civil society, We are in a real emergency."

Perhaps after years of wrangling, we come to a political will that holds the developers of private spyware accountable, and a group of 18 members of the US Congress sent a letter to the Treasury and State Departments calling for agencies to sanction NSO and 3 other international watchdogs.

Beer and Gross told Wire magazine that "NSO is not alone [in developing spy technologies], but it has been caught red-handed."