In News 

• Recently, The Supreme Court-appointed technical committee  found no conclusive evidence on use of the Pegasus spyware in phones examined by it.

Pegasus Spyware

• What is it? Pegasus is the hacking software – or spyware. It has the capability to infect billions of phones running either iOS or Android operating systems.
• By whom? It is developed, marketed and licensed to governments around the world by the Israeli company NSO Group.

Techniques

• The earliest version of Pegasus discovered in 2016, infected phones through spear-phishing – text messages or emails that trick a target into clicking on a malicious link.
• Pegasus infections can also be achieved through “zero-click” attacks, which do not require any interaction from the phone’s owner in order to succeed. 
• These will often exploit “zero-day” vulnerabilities, which are flaws in an operating system that the mobile phone’s manufacturer does not yet know about and so has not been able to fix.
• How can one detect Pegasus Spyware? Amnesty International researchers have developed a tool  called Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT) which  is aimed to identify if the Pegasus spyware has targeted your phone.

Source:TH