If you are concerned about the latest news regarding the Spyware Pegasus, which appears to have been installed by the Israeli group NSO to to hack journalists and world leaders, there is a tool to check if it is hidden on your iPhone. But surely you have nothing to fear.
According to a report published by the Washington post in collaboration with the non-profit organizations Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International, among others, the Spyware military use developed by an Israeli company was used in about 40 smartphones “belonging to journalists, human rights activists, executives and two women familiar with the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi.”
Cell phones were on a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers, according to the To post. The ONS has denied these allegations.
Chances are, your iPhone is not on this list. Although the legality of this operation is in question, reports suggest that the ONS only targeted high-level politicians, government officials and journalists, and that they were only successful in less than half.
For example, Amnesty International examined 67 mobiles and concluded that “23 were successfully infected and 14 showed signs of having been tried”. Of those, nearly all of them were iPhones, according to the research.
But if you are concerned, there is a way to check if your iPhone has been infected. You should know that this is not an easy test, but if you are using a Mac or Linux PC and have used it to backup your iPhone, Amnesty International’s Mobile Verification Toolkit will be able to detect if your mobile has the Spyware Pegasus installed.
This tool, which TechCrunch was able to test, it works using the macOS Terminal app and finds your iPhone’s latest backup on your Mac, but “it’s not a fancy user experience and requires knowledge of how to navigate the terminal”.
You will need to install libusb, in addition to Python 3 using Homebrew. GitHub has more information about the installation process. TechCrunch ensures that this check only takes “a minute or two” after you set it up.
On Twitter, the user @rayredacted has detailed the process in a long thread which includes additional sources and explanations.
As you may have heard, @amnesty released mat-detect. an amazing tool to detect if your device has any evidence that it may have been affected by Pegasus spyware. In this thread, I will tell you about my experience and lessons of using this tool on iOS. (1/13) pic.twitter.com/pJRTv4FVPf
– Ray [REDACTED] (@RayRedacted)
July 21, 2021
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Original article published in igamesnews US.
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