Dozens of journalists’ iPhones have been affected by malware that allows nation-states to listen in. It would be Pegasus spyware.
That writes CitizenLab, a research group linked to the University of Toronto. The spyware would reach the phones through an exploit of the NSO Group, an Israeli espionage company. This is a similar exploit to the one that hit WhatsApp last year.
According to Citizenlab, 36 personal phones have been affected, belonging to journalists at Al-Jazeera and Britain’s Al Araby TV. The attacks are said to come from several NSO customers from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The investigation came at the request of one of the victims, an Al Jazeera reporter who suspected his phone had been hacked. In their technical report, the researchers explain that a rare zero-day bug was used for iOS for this attack.
This is a so-called ‘zero-click exploit’, one that can be performed without the victim having to click on anything, making these types of exploits worth a lot of money in specific markets.
Once inside the device, the hackers could install their spyware to follow along with the camera or audio, see the location of the device and scrape passwords. The exploit would no longer work on iOS 14, but may still be active on iOS 13.5.1.