PB notables:
>>14150766 Israeli spyware is found on cellphones of journalists including at New York Times, CNN and AP, as well as members of royal families and politicians around the world
If your phones is not infected by Pegasus, you are very lucky.
You can't get rid of it, ever after a factory reset.
It's declared 'abuse of human rights'.
Billions of phones might be infected with new 'zero-click' attack.
How Pegasus infects phones?
Over the years, Pegasus has evolved in the way it operates and infects devices. The first version of the spyware was detected in 2016 and used spear-phishing to infect a smartphone. This means that it worked through a malicious link, usually sent to the target through a bogus text message or an email. The device became infected as soon as the link was clicked.
What can Pegasus do?
It now adopts a different and more sophisticated approach for reaching new targets. Shockingly, the new method does not require any input from the target user. It can infect a device by what is called a "zero-click" attack.
''Once a smartphone is infected by it, Pegasus can effectively monitor any activity you perform on it. This includes reading or copying your messages, extracting your media files, accessing your browser history, recording your calls and much more.
It can even turn the device into a surveillance tool by turning on its microphone to listen and record an ongoing conversation. Similarly, it can trigger the phone's camera to record a video at any point in time.
The spyware can even be used to extract the exact location of a device, or the history of its whereabouts. This means an infected smartphone will effectively give out the locations that its user has visited in the past or is currently at.
In 2017 researchers at anti-virus company Kaspersky wrote, "We're talking total surveillance. Pegasus is modular malware. After scanning the target's device, it installs the necessary modules to read the user's messages and mail, listen to calls, capture screenshots, log pressed keys, exfiltrate browser history, contacts, and so on and so forth. It can spy on every aspect of the target's life. It's also noteworthy that Pegasus could even listen to encrypted audio streams and read encrypted messages — thanks to its keylogging and audio recording capabilities, it was stealing messages before they were encrypted (and, for incoming messages, after decryption)."''
https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/features/story/pegasus-updated-guide-how-it-infects-phones-what-it-does-how-to-detect-and-get-rid-of-it-1829931-2021-07-19