Riyadh: Pegasus, a software created by the Israeli cyber security company NSO Group Technologies, created a ruckus all over the world through which people were being targeted very easily, but do you know, how the NSO Group’s poll was exposed and after all who is this woman from Saudi Arabia, who is being spied on?
Pegasus was first caught through a photo file found in the iPhone of Saudi Arabian woman Loujain al-Hathloul.
Loujain Al- Hathloul is one of the most prominent activists in Saudi Arabia and is best known for her role in leading a campaign to end a ban on women driving in the kingdom. The authorities released her in February 2021, after being imprisoned on charges of harming national security.
Loujain Al-Hathloul’s phone hacked
The incidents all started with a software failure in the iPhone of Loujain Al-Hathloul. It is reported that a mysterious fake photo file inside her phone, left by the spyware by mistake, revealed the hack to phone security researchers.
The discovery of Al-Hathloul’s phone in 2021 sparked a storm of legal and governmental action that put NSO on the defensive.
Soon after her release in February 2021, Al-Hathloul received an email from Google warning her that government-backed hackers had attempted to hack her Gmail account.
Fearing that her iPhone would also be hacked, she contacted Canadian privacy rights group Citizen Lab and asked them to check her device for evidence.
Spying exposed in Canadian lab
According to Reuters, Canada’s Citizen Lab checked the mobile phone of Loujain Al-Hathloul for about six months and then found the surveillance software through which her phone was hacked. This software steals all the messages in the phone and sends them to their servers.
The Canadian organization said that NSO Group has created this software and after this disclosure, for the first time the world came to know about the spy software Pegasus. At the same time, US officials claimed that this software was also used to keep an eye on American diplomats.
Case against NSO Group in 2021
Last year, when the spy software Pegasus became known, Apple filed a lawsuit against the Israeli cyber firm NSO Group. At the same time, after increasing a lot of ruckus, the NSO Group said that it sells its software only to government agencies and governments. At the same time, allegations of espionage have also been denied by the company, but after a lot of uproar, the Israeli government also shied away from this software.
How dangerous is this software
Pegasus is considered a very fast spy software and it does not require any kind of permission from you to be installed on the phone. It gets installed in the phone in a very clever way and all the information related to the phone is sent to its owner and users do not even get information about the phone being hacked. What message is present on the phone, who sent the message, what is being talked about, where the conversation is taking place etc, can be traced seamlessly. Pegasus software keeps on transmitting every information to its owner. Even if the phone is in the pocket and you are talking to another person, this software records it and sends it to its owner.
