"PEGASUS Project": How to know if you were infected with the surveillance software?

Following revelations on Pegasus, the spy software of the Israeli company NSO, many journalists, politicians, businessmen and activists wonder if their smartphone could be monitored by the states which areCustomers: Morocco, Hungary, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, and several other countries.

Their fear is legitimate since NSO has selected 50,000 mobiles worldwide for potential infection, including a thousand in France, without knowing exactly what part was pegasus.This list is not public and it is not easy to know if a mobile has been infected: the traces are hidden in a corner of the device to which we only access it in a computer.

Complex detection tools

The revelations on Pegasus were carried by a consortium of 17 media, including Le Monde, coordinated by the French non -profit association Forbidden Stories, backed by the technical skills of the English NGO Amnesty International.The latter is currently faced with many requests which prohibit her to offer her computer expertise within a reasonable time to anyone who would request it.

But it published on July 16 a set of tools to check the presence of Pegasus on an Android or Apple smartphone accompanied by a complex methodological explanation and a help page.The American technological media Techcrunch has taken control of this tool, the interface of which may seem confusing for ordinary people - we navigate by typing computer command.

If these tools are public, the detection process requires certain computer knowledge, working hours, as well as being equipped with a computer under Linux or Mac OS.In addition, after analysis, Techcrunch journalists initially found a sign of infection in their mobile, but it was an error, a "false positive" since corrected in the detection tool forAmnesty.

Caution

In the future, it is possible that the general public based on Amnesty methodology is made available to the general public and with a easier graphical interface to handle.The NGO tools are in open source license: they can be duplicated and modified freely.

If, for two days, several online services claim to offer a reliable "Pegasus" test, it is currently strongly advised against having recourse to these services claiming to be able to detect the spy software.They could hide a scam or malware.Recall that the chances for the general public to have been infected with Pegasus remain weak.

Nicolas Six

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