The Pegasus returns to the news cycle a few weeks ago he put it back Spyware in the spotlight. Its invulnerability to iOS 14.6 made it particularly dangerous, as it was one of the more recent versions of iOS. Now and thanks to iMazing and Amnesty International, there is a simple and free tool with which check if our iPhone has been infected with Pegasus. Let’s see what it consists of.
A tool based on the work of Amnesty International
A few weeks ago, Amnesty International released its Mobile Verification Toolkit, a free tool hosted on GitHub that This allowed us to check if our Android or iPhone terminal was infected. The tool is not easy to use by users unfamiliar with the command line, so it has distanced the target audience from Pegasus a bit by authoritarian regimes (journalists, dissidents, etc.).
Now, iMazing has added a test to its popular device maintenance app to detect Spyware Pegasus. And he does it for free, building on the work of Amnesty International. Its intention is not to “sow fear”, since the vast majority of iPhone users are not in danger, but rather to “lower the barrier of entry” of the tool.
From iMazing, they ensure that the use of the tool is anonymous and freeeven after the 7-day trial of the application. All scans take place on our Mac or PC and none of our data is uploaded to the cloud or to any of our servers or third parties. To give us peace of mind, the company encourages that the backup their app works with be encrypted.
Pegasus is aimed at specific users who “annoy” certain authoritarian regimes, so that the general user can be reassured.
It must be remembered that this type of Pegasus attack are oriented towards specific topics
How to use iMazing to detect Pegasus on your iPhone
First, we will need to download and install the latest available version of iMazing. By following the steps, we will have it ready to use. On our Mac, we need to go to System Preferences> Security & Privacy> Privacy and mark iMazing in the Full Disk Access folder. This way we will allow the app to work with a local backup of our device.
Next, we connect our iPhone to the computer and we agree to trust him if we haven’t already. We open iMazing and select it. Next, we will search for the Detect Spyware tool and click on it, at which point the guide to run it will open.
We will follow the steps, by configuring the “reviewer” of Spyware as we wish. We will accept the terms and conditions and we will start the analysis. It may take up to an hour, depending on how much data is in your iPhone. But the normal thing is that we see this result, showing zero threat of Spyware:
In the distant case, you see a positive, from iMazing They ask you to send them the results report to rule out a false positive. While they are solving it, they recommend that you remove the SIM card from your iPhone and turn it off.
The only way to get rid of Pegasus, if we suspect or know from the tool that we are infected, it is a matter of putting the iPhone in DFU mode and restoring it from scratch. This is the most effective way to get rid of it Spyware.
