New Toolkit Helps Detect Pegasus Spyware Targeting Activists Worldwide
An international reporting consortium reveals that authoritarian governments use NSO Group's Pegasus spyware to hack thousands of smartphones. Amnesty International releases a new open-source toolkit to help potential victims detect the intrusive surveillance.
An international coalition of news outlets reports that several authoritarian governments use NSO Group's Pegasus spyware to hack the smartphones of journalists, activists, and politicians. A leaked list of 50,000 phone numbers reveals the massive scale of this surveillance, with confirmed infections showing that the spyware accesses all data on a victim's device. Hungary, despite being a member of the European Union, is named as a customer of the controversial Israeli spyware firm.
NSO Group strongly denies the allegations and insists it does not know who its government customers target. However, researchers at Amnesty International and the Citizen Lab confirm that Pegasus infects devices through malicious links or "zero-click" exploits that require no interaction from the user. These silent attacks successfully compromise devices running the most up-to-date versions of Apple's iOS software.
In response to these revelations, Amnesty International releases the Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT) to help individuals detect if their devices are compromised. The open-source forensic tool works on both iPhones and Androids, though researchers note that Pegasus leaves more traces on iOS devices, making detection easier on Apple products. Users can run their device backups through the toolkit to check for specific indicators of compromise.