What is Pegasus, the malware that infected Pedro Sánchez's mobile

A press conference held this morning confirmed thate the President of the Spanish Government, Pedro Sánchez, and his Defense Minister, Margarita Robles, saw their mobile devices affected by malware of Israeli origin known as Pegasus.

According to the report, the attacks on Sánchez occurred in May and June of last year, while the one on Robles occurred in June.

what is pegasus

Technically Pegasus would not be a malware since It was designed by the Israeli company NSO to be used by state security organizations with judicial authorization. But, as reported last year by a media consortium, More than 30.000 human rights activists, journalists and lawyers around the world may have been targeted with Pegasus. Pegasus uses various security issues of iOS devices.

According to a study sponsored by Amnesty International, the software was repeatedly misused for surveillance. The list of people who were victims includes 14 world leaders (with Sánchez it would be 15) and many other activists, human rights defenders, dissidents and opposition figures. Nor was the US State Department spared.

The report had consequences.

Israeli government representatives visited the NSO offices as part of an investigation into the allegations. For its part, the Supreme Court of India commissioned a technical committee to investigate the use of Pegasus to spy on its citizens while Apple announced, in November, that it was going to take legal action against NSO Group for developing software aimed at its users. with 'malware and spyware'.

One point to keep in mind is that it is hardly a program that your partner can pay to see who you chat with on WhatsApp. In theory it should only be sold to states and its cost is measured in millions of euros.

That is to say that nobody is going to install Pegasus or its Android versions in parsley like us. Although they can try cheaper conversions.

How to protect yourself

In the case of state-sponsored malware, the best way to protect yourself is to stay mobile.  If your adversary can afford to spend millions of dollars on their offensive programs, it is very unlikely that a target will be able to avoid being infected. It's all a matter of time.

Sure, they don't have it that easy. Exploits have to be tuned for specific hardware and operating system versions, and become ineffective with new or alternate versions of operating systems, security updates, or even best usage practices.

Some protection methods are:

Return to factory settings.

This returns the phone to the state it came out of the box. You will need to reinstall the OS updates and, bypassing the backups, install the updates manually.

Don't use the official apps

Avoid using pre-installed apps that use Google or Apple services. In the case of Android you have the advantage of using alternative stores like F-Droid which has a wide range of applications that, being open source, make it difficult to use them to distribute malware.

In the case of Apple, choose applications whose license is open source.

Buy yourself a PinePhone

If you live in a serious country, that is to say, in one not located south of the Tropic of Capricorn between the Andes Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean, where with the excuse of protecting the national industry they make you a hostage of the Apple and Google duopoly, paying it sa price of gold, you can buy yourself a PinePhone.

It is a phone that uses Linux as the operating system and allows you to disable the camera, microphone, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and modem by hardware.

A question to finish

It's none of my business because I'm on the other side of the Atlantic, but was Sánchez and his officials paid for by Spanish taxpayers?

It is true that Android also has malware, but it does not tie you to a single software and hardware provider AND, you have models with similar features to those of Apple at a lower price.