NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware can turn any infected smartphone into a remote microphone and camera, spying on its own owner while also offering the hacker – usually in the form of a state intelligence or law enforcement agency – full access to files, messages and, of course, the user’s location.

Pegasus is one of a number of proprietary tools sold as part of the hacker-for-hire industry – and one found at the very high-end of that dark market. Other companies offer less expensive services – for example, only providing geolocation services for its clients.

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So how can you protect yourself? And how can you check to see if your phone has been targeted in the past or is infected now?

Haaretz offers a simple, nontechnical explanation on how to check and stay safe…

The weakest link

Most cellphone spyware operates in a similar fashion: a message is sent to a phone with a nefarious message. The message usually contains a link that will either download the malware onto your device directly, or refer it to a website that will prompt a download – all unbeknown to the phone’s owner.

There are other ways to get your phone to download something that don’t involve a message. However, from the moment of infection, most spyware tools follow a similar protocol: once installed, the spyware contacts what is called a “command-and-control” server, which provides it with instructions remotely.

“Let’s say the Israel Police are the ones who installed Pegasus on your smartphone and they want to know where you – or, more precisely, your phone – has been in the previous 24 hours. To get that information, instructions to obtain that data are sent to a C&C server connected to the phone,” explains Dr. Gil David, a researcher and cybersecurity consultant.

The best way to stay safe, any cybersecurity expert will tell you, is to never – ever! – open any link sent to you, unless it’s a link you are expecting from someone you know and trust.

The reason is that, once infected, “the C&C server communicates between the hacker and the spyware installed on your phone. Without it, the hacker has no way of relaying instructions to Pegasus, and Pegasus has no way to get information from the victim’s phone back to the hacker,” David writes in Haaretz Hebrew.

Many times, the links sent to you will appear innocent. It may look like a message from the Post Office or Amazon. But don’t be fooled: Through some simple social engineering and a process called “DNS spoofing,” even an official-looking URL may be a trap.

Double zero

Sadly, staying safe is not always possible.

What makes Pegasus so expensive is its ability to not just potentially infect any smartphone selected for targeting remotely, but to do so with a “zero click” infection. This means your phone can be infected without you even having to click on a link – for example, with the code instructing your phone to reach out to the server secretly encoded into a WhatsApp message or even in a file like a photo texted to you via iMessage.

These “zero click” attacks make use of what is called “zero-day” exploits: unknown loopholes in your phone’s defenses that allow these hidden bits of code to kick into action without the victim doing anything.

So, another good practice is to make sure your phone’s operating system is as updated as possible: As new exploits are discovered, they are quickly “patched” by the likes of Apple and Google.

According to digital forensics experts Amnesty International and Citizen Lab, Pegasus’ zero click infections have only been found on iPhones. “Most recently, a successful ‘zero-click’ attack has been observed exploiting multiple zero-days to attack a fully patched iPhone 12 running iOS 14.6 in July 2021,” Amnesty notes in its instructive report “How to Catch NSO Group’s Pegasus.”

It seems Pegasus’ ability to infect iPhones was based on a previously unknown loophole in the iMessage service, and this too has subsequently been patched. However, other Israel firms, for instance QuadDream, reportedly have such abilities as well.

“From 2019, an increasing amount of vulnerabilities in iOS, especially iMessage and FaceTime, started getting patched thanks to their discoveries by vulnerability researchers, or to cybersecurity vendors reporting exploits discovered in-the-wild,” Amnesty writes – so make sure your phone is updated.

Indicators of compromise

Groups like Amnesty and Citizen Lab find NSO’s spyware on phones using two different methods. Both involve searching for what is termed “indicators of compromise,” or IOCs.

Amnesty maintains a database of nefarious domains used by NSO’s clients. The list is constantly updating as more bogus URLs are found. Citizen Lab, meanwhile, also maintains a database of so-called vectors: messages sent to victims containing nefarious code or URLS. The two groups each maintain updated lists of Pegasus’ related processes that together permit attribution.

The only thing that has changed with Pegasus over the years is the way your phone is referred to the server, and the way the so-called payload is delivered.

“While SMS messages carrying malicious links were the tactic of choice for NSO Group’s customers between 2016 and 2018, in more recent years they appear to have become increasingly rare,” Amnesty wrote in its July 2021 report.

The newer trend, discovered in the case of Moroccan journalist Omar Radi, who was infected with Pegasus in 2020, is what is known as “packet injection.” This means that the download order is delivered not through a message but instead through your network, in the form of a hidden command “injected” into the phone through what Amnesty describes as “tactical devices, such as rogue cell towers, or through dedicated equipment placed at the mobile operator.

“The discovery of network injection attacks in Morocco signaled that the attackers’ tactics were indeed changing. Network injection is an effective and cost-efficient attack vector for domestic use especially in countries with leverage over mobile operators,” it explained.

As NSO’s clients are state agencies, they can easily make use of the mobile infrastructure to infect phones.

Therefore, and though such injection infections can also be forced upon you, other good practices include never using free Wi-Fi; never connecting to wireless networks you do not absolutely know are secure – as these networks can easily be hacked so they infect your phone and refer it to the snooping server. Not using so-called VPNs is also advisable for the same reason.

Get checked, get vaccinated

Chances are you have not been infected with Pegasus. However, if you have cause for concern and are scared you are or were infected, there are a few options:

Amnesty offers a useful, free and open source tool called the Mobile Verification Toolkit that can check a backup of your device or its logs for any IOC. The MVT will scan your iPhone’s logs for Pegasus-related processes or search your Android’s messages for nefarious links.

The tool can be downloaded here. The bad news is that it requires some technical know-how and is currently devoid of a simple-to-use interface.

To get it to work, you first need to make a specific type of backup of your phone, and then you need to download the program and run the code on your computer so it can scan the file you created.

Running the program requires you to download Python. Luckily, the tool comes with very clear instructions, and even those unskilled in code can make use of it with a bit of effort. Furthermore, it also allows you to conduct the test yourself.

A similar product is iMazing, a phone-backup platform that runs on your desktop and provides a MVT-like analysis of your device. It does not prevent infections but can check your phone for IOCs.

If the best offense is defense, there’s also a growing cellphone security market. Cyberdefense firms like ZecOps offer organizations like the BBC and Fortune 2000 companies a platform that inspects phones for current infections or traces of historic attacks. ZecOps also provides this service pro bono for journalists involved in the Pegasus Project.

Private users can also buy such services. For example, the Israeli-Indian security firm SafeHouse Technologies offers an app called “BodyGuard” that provides defenses for your phone, for a small price. It already has more than a million users, mostly in India.

If you can’t get the Mobile Verification Toolkit to work and are reluctant to use an app, and you genuinely fear you have been targeted, you can also drop us a tip here and we at Haaretz will get you checked.