Is there anything that prevents Pegasus from spreading by itself or must it be installed via a targeted attack? And is there a way of scanning for it to see if a phone is infected?
So at least for now we'd expect all Pegasus installations to be a result of targeted attacks. On the other hand, if the tool leaks and becomes readily available to multiple actors, then the incentives change and one of them might decide to make a worm that infects everyone in the world who's not patched.
I see that someone flagged my comment.
I suspect that it was not because it was hurtful or destructive, but because I chose to use the national currency of Israel as the denomination (instead of dollars, which would actually be disrespectful), and someone that skipped Social Studies, thought it was being "anti-semitic."
Sort of like the paediatrician in UK, that was attacked, because some idiot thought the sign outside her office meant she was a paedophile.
It would be relatively trivial to write such - simply have it send the exploit via iMessage to all of a targets contacts, rinse and repeat.
This would be counterproductive though - the whole selling point of Pegasus is targeted surveillance, and such exploits are very costly - uncontrolled spreading would make it detected much faster, burning a valuable resource.
If such exploits were cheap, it’s plausible you could justify writing a variant that automatically attacks a targets entire address book to mine their social graph, but then you have the problem of analysing a shitload of probably worthless data…
They presumably also configure their command and control to only persist if it is one of the designated targets and wipe all traces if it is not, so even forwarding the attack payload would probably not do anything. You would need to determine you have been compromised and then reverse engineer the exploit so you could replace the command payload with a irreversible bricking operation to do what you suggest.
At that point you might as well spend the $5M-$10M to develop the entire attack yourself. If you are a competitor to Apple spending $10M to completely destroy the $2.7T Apple is literal pocket change; too small to even show up on your financials.
You're comparing two near completely unrelated numbers here. That's not what enterprise value means; it doesn't mean much of anything really.
How does that even work?
I mean if the bug in the browser, you have to visit the page to have the payload get to you, but it's a phone. A device for other people to contact you.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/amitchowdhry/2015/05/29/apple-e...
International weapons dealing doesn't work that way. Point to any manufacturer of weapons and there's a bunch of people that don't like them. But the countries that benefit from those weapons don't agree.
It is a race though, so past info may no longer be valid. However, I doubt it will ever be able to spread by itself, since it uses very expensive zero days to infect and they will be quickly fixed after detection.