NSO’s “clever” spyware technology offers a cyber weapon “against which there is no defense” and amounts to “great work, from an engineering perspective,” cybersecurity experts and researchers said this week.
The Israeli company’s flagship spyware, Pegasus, is considered one of the most powerful cyber-surveillance tools available on the market, giving operators the ability to effectively take full control of a target’s phone, download all data from the device, or activate its camera or microphone without the user knowing. The company has once again been making headlines in recent weeks as revelations about the reach of its technology, and the consequences, keep piling up.
In a deep technical dive into how the spyware works, cybersecurity researchers Ian Beer and Samuel Groß said NSO developed capabilities that use “one of the most technically sophisticated exploits we’ve ever seen,” and would have previously thought these would “be accessible to only a handful of nation states.”
Beer and Groß are cybersecurity experts at Google Project Zero, the company’s team of security analysts tasked with finding zero-day vulnerabilities, potential…
