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Comment by meibo | Hacker News Reader

It's the name of a iOS malware/RAT by NSO, an Israeli company that likes to sell their software to governments offering varying degrees of personal freedom around the world.

It's been around with zero-click exploits for years, and apparently even now, after their big iMessage "security" rewrite with iOS 14. Very likely that they have other entrypoints as well though.

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Just so no one is confused: as the Facebook lawsuit confirmed, NSO is running the C&C servers for their clients. They are not selling some software, "do what you want".

It is NSO running these operations. They are directly implicated in whatever their malware ends up doing.

So Pegasus somehow manages to stay alive patch after patch when every other exploit and virus out there gets shut down

Is it not clear that at least Apple must be involved in this too? Who else is?

...No, it is not clear.

Every other exploit and virus is used by impatient idiots. NSO knows how to stockpile exploits.

I've been there done that. It's how we pretty much kept Wii homebrew available consistently throughout the console's life. We had the next exploit ready before Nintendo patched the current one.

Apple isn't involved. NSO are just good at their job.

Thanks for the explanation. It might seem obvious to people involved in this type of work, but I honestly found it hard to believe

Pegasus was also used by Saudi Arabia to hack Jeff Bezos’ phone and it was MBS (the crown prince) himself that sent the iMessage to him.

It was a WhatsApp missed call

WhatsApp video [1]

[1] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/jeff-bezos-phone-hack-mbs-sa...

Did that actually happen? I thought the Saudi Arabia hack was a convenient tale conjured up by Bezos’ team to cover up that his girlfriend was the one sending his pictures and messages to her brother, who in turn tried selling it to the National Enquirer.

Other way around, National Enquirer was the fence using the brother as a cover story for the hack. (National Enquirer is a friend of Saudi Arabia by the way, if you didn't catch the special edition "The New Kingdom" magazine published by their parent company)

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