Ever heard of the NSO Group and Pegasus? They’ve been in the news and not usually in a good way,
Now they have a competitor, QuaDream. Despite being banned in the US, these spyware companies are doing a thriving business out of Israel. Here’s an article by Haaretz about the Citizen Lab report on QuaDream.
What does this mean to you? In theory, this state-actor hacking, to the extent they are not legitimately going after bad guys, is quite offensive to a free society. It may not affect you directly but you should find it offensive that it can happen to the supposedly free press.
The idea that governments exert influence on news and social media organizations is a hot top right now. Yet there are countless examples of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, and now QuaDream’s Reign software, that show us this type of tool, in the hands of humans, appears to be subject to abuse.
The people involved in the latest Citizen Lab expose who were hacked by QuaDream tools have not had their names made public yet. They are identified as “journalists, politicians and a civil society activist” — certainly not people you would expect to be on a Pegasus- or QuaDream-using government’s list of people to surveil.
If you find this subject interesting, I suggest you spend some time at the Citizen Lab site looking at the abuses committed with these state-directed malware tools:
You can just search for terms like Pegasus and see a good history, or check out some of these articles:
PEGASUS / NSO GROUP
- Peace through Pegasus – Jordanian Human Rights Defenders and Journalists Hacked with Pegasus Spyware
- The Washington Post — A UAE agency put Pegasus spyware on phone of Jamal Khashoggi’s wife months before his murder, new forensics show
- HIDE AND SEEK — Tracking NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware to Operations in 45 Countries
REIGN / QUADREAM
- Israel-based Spyware Firm QuaDream Targets High-Risk iPhones with Zero-Click Exploit
- Microsoft — DEV-0196: QuaDream’s “KingsPawn” malware used to target civil society in Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia
OK thanks for reading through this far! We won’t post quite this many articles every week, or maybe we will!