The recent Pegasus Project revelations of about half a lakh people across the world, including several in India, being targeted for cyber surveillance has firmly brought the spotlight on the Pegasus spyware, which is widely understood to be the most sophisticated smartphone attack tool. The revelations also mark the first time that a malicious remote jailbreak exploit had been detected within an iPhone.
Pegasus is a spyware (Trojan/Script) that can be installed remotely on devices running on Apple’s iOS & Google’s Android operating systems. It is developed and marketed by the Israeli technology firm NSO Group. NSO Group sells Pegasus to “vetted governments” for “lawful interception”, which is understood to mean combating terrorism and organised crime, as the firm claims, but suspicions exist that it is availed for other purposes.
NSO Group’s majority ownership vests its co-founders Omri Lavie and Shalev Hulo, and the European private equity fund Novalpina Capital. An American private equity firm,
— source theleaflet.in | Prashant Pandey | 21 Jul 2021