It lands on your cellphone with its giant wings flapping, penetrates the phone’s operating system, reads messages and emails, cracks passwords, tracks your location, and even accesses the mic and the camera. It is Pegasus, a dangerous spyware named after the winged horse in Greek mythology, and designed by the Israeli cyber-intelligence firm NSO Group to hack into cellphones through WhatsApp, the multimedia messaging platform owned by Facebook.
Pegasus can infect devices running on Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems. Its snooping prowess is notorious—1,400 individuals in 45 nations have been targeted so far. India woke up to the Pegasus threat only recently, when it was revealed that 121 of the victims were Indians, most of them lawyers, activists and journalists.
NSO Group says it sells Pegasus to government clients only. So, when Congress general secretary Priyanka Gandhi Vadra revealed that she, too, was targeted, it resulted in an avalanche of allegations that the Union government was behind the snooping. “When WhatsApp sent messages to all those whose phones were hacked, one such message was also received by Priyanka Gandhi Vadra,” said Randeep Surjewala, chief spokesperson for the Congress, on November 2.
Four days earlier, WhatsApp had filed a lawsuit against NSO in a US court, saying Pegasus piggybacked on its app to infect cellphones. With 400 million users, India is WhatsApp’s biggest market. To contain the fallout from the security breach, the messaging giant has gone all out to assure users that their privacy and security remained its highest priority. It has reached out to the victims, asking them to update the app to protect themselves.
This story is from the November 17, 2019 edition of THE WEEK.
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This story is from the November 17, 2019 edition of THE WEEK.
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