On 18 July, there were reports in the world that 50,000 phones were being spied on globally. The technology used to spy on these phones is reportedly a spyware called Pegasus, made by an Israeli company called NSO. This is a company that was sold to a private equity firm called Francisco Ventures, and then bought back by the founders in 2019. The spyware’s name, Pegasus, itself describes what it does – it stands for a winged Trojan horse that flies “over the air” into your phone. This essentially means that without your knowledge, spyware embeds itself in your phone. And it does this “over the air” because a mobile phone is essentially a wireless device.
The first question that arises is whether this is technically possible. The answer is that it is certainly within the realm of possibility. If the systems of Iranian nuclear centrifuges can be hacked, even if they are not connected to the Internet in any way, a connected mobile phone can certainly be hacked, if there are enough resources…
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