Apple has released an emergency software update to fix a security flaw in its iPhones and other products researchers found was being exploited by the Israeli-based NSO Group to infect the devices with its Pegasus spyware. Over 1.65 billion Apple products in use around the globe were vulnerable to the spyware since at least March. Apple said vulnerable devices could be hacked by receiving a malicious PDF file that users don’t even have to click, known as “zero-click” exploit. The flaw was discovered by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which found the hack in the iPhone records of a Saudi political activist. Earlier this year, a massive data leak revealed Pegasus software had targeted the phones of thousands of journalists, activists and political figures around the world for foreign governments and NSO Group clients.
we and others, our partners at Amnesty International, other research groups, have been tracking, broadly speaking, the commercial spyware market for many years now. And NSO Group first came on our radar, you will recall, back in 2016, when we discovered it was being used by the United Arab Emirates to target a human rights defender named Ahmed Mansoor. Ever since then, we and others have documented extensive abuses of this company’s technology.
So, not surprisingly, when
— source democracynow.org | Sep 15, 2021