Of the 50,000 phone numbers in the data, we had been able to verify, with multiple sources for each, the identities of more than 1,000 people from fifty countries. The count included more than 600 politicians and government officials, including 3 presidents, 10 prime ministers, and 1 king. There were 65 businessmen, 85 human rights activists or attorneys, and 2 Emirati princesses. Craig Timberg’s last-minute addition of an American reporter working in Saudi Arabia pushed our count of journalists to 192.
‘Pegasus’, Laurent Richard, S Rigaud
The location of where Pegasus attack vectors originated was updated for the final report which produced the undeniable evidence of this military-grade cyberweapon being deployed by high risk clients:
The Security Lab crew was also making the final editorial changes to their Forensic Methodology Report, which had a lot of moving parts. The list of countries hosting the most servers where Pegasus attack vectors originated had to be updated with raw numbers. The UK, Switzerland, France, and the US were high on that list, but Germany stood atop it. “Some of the biggest hosting companies are in Germany, as well as some of the cheaper ones,” Claudio says. “Pretty common destination when you want to set up infrastructure on a large scale.” Claudio and Donncha were also able to report that NSO had recently—and ill-advisedly—started using Amazon WebServices as a host for at least seventy-three of their servers.
When the report became global it led to the demise of NSO, but UAE employed a number of ex NSO coders, plus some mercenary former agents from the world’s premier signals intelligence organisation, the United State’s National Security Agency. As a result, the high risk (poor human rights record) UAE, having been a customer of NSO, created its own in-house spyware, Dark Matter.
No democratic country has called out UAE, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the worst of them, Azerbaijan, for use of spyware against their citizens who oppose their vicious repressive governments.
As NSO goes down, more private companies spring up to fill the gap. This is capitalism at its worst.
Shameful mercenaries:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/14/us/politics/darkmatter-uae-hacks.html
And
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKCN1PO1CV
And as the old song goes: ‘Everybody’s doing it, doing it, doing it………
https://thehackernews.com/2023/05/bouldspy-android-spyware-iranian.html?m=1
And remember how human rights are the least of concerns when insurers/bankers see a chance to make big returns when loaning Israeli settlers funds to disposses Palestinians so they can extend their settlements:
borderslynn 