You Can Scan Your iPhone for Pegasus Spyware For Only a Dollar
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A new app allows you to scan your iPhone for the presence of Pegasus spyware for the one-time price of a single American dollar. Pegasus is a sophisticated, industrial-grade piece of mercenary spyware that can infect an iPhone using zero-day vulnerabilities to mount zero-click exploits that can access nearly all the data stored on the device.
Mobile device security firm iVerify created the app, which allows users to run scans of their iPhone or Android phone and send the results to the firm for analysis. The firm says it has already found seven smartphones infected by the nasty spyware.
What is Pegasus Spyware?
Pegasus spyware was created by NSO Group, an Israeli cyber intelligence firm that’s always on the lookout for new zero-day exploits discovered by hackers. The vulnerabilities, called “zero-day” as they’re unknown to device manufacturers like Apple, are purchased by NSO and integrated into its Pegasus spyware. The software can use these to mount “zero-click” exploits that require no user interaction by the targeted victim.
Pegasus can reportedly infect an iPhone using a text in iMessage, even if the user doesn’t open the message or interact with it in any way. Pegasus compromises the smartphone, providing access to nearly all of the data stored on the device.
While NSO Group only sells the Pegasus software to governments, those customers unfortunately include countries with horrible human rights records. The software is believed to be used by those countries to target political opponents, journalists, lawyers, human rights activists, and other high-profile users.
Wired first reported on this new way to proactively scan your iPhone for the presence of Pegasus.
On Tuesday, the mobile device security firm iVerify is publishing findings from a spyware detection feature it launched in May. Of 2,500 device scans that the company’s customers elected to submit for inspection, seven revealed infections by the notorious NSO Group malware known as Pegasus.
The company’s “Mobile Threat Hunting” feature uses a combination of malware signature-based detection, heuristics, and machine learning to look for anomalies in iOS and Android device activity or telltale signs of spyware infection.
While these are specifically targeted attacks that are most commonly applied against politically high-profile individuals, iVerify says that the seven victims it has so far discovered included a broader cross-section of users than they had expected.
“The really fascinating thing is that the people who were targeted were not just journalists and activists, but business leaders, people running commercial enterprises, people in government positions,” says Rocky Cole, chief operating officer of iVerify and a former US National Security Agency analyst. “It looks a lot more like the targeting profile of your average piece of malware or your average APT group than it does the narrative that’s been out there that mercenary spyware is being abused to target activists. It is doing that, absolutely, but this cross section of society was surprising to find.”
Individuals Can Now Scan Their iPhones for Pegasus Spyware
While iVerify’s business model is to offer a subscription scanning service to enterprise companies and other organizations, constantly scanning the devices, the firm now offers a way for individual smartphone owners to conduct their own monthly scans manually.
The company sells the iVerify Basics app for $0.99 for iPhone and Android. Users can scan their iPhones for the presence of Pegasus, which only takes a few seconds. They can also generate and send a special diagnostic utility file to iVerify and receive an analysis within hours. Users can use the tool once a month.
