Kan polisen se vad jag gör på mobilen i realtid?

Om möjligt, vad krävs utifrån ett tekniskt perspektiv och gällande avstånd till den man bevakar?

Är det ens möjligt för polisen att på kontoret bedriva sådan bevakning (trivial och kanske lite dum fråga)?

Pegasus: The ultimate spyware for iOS and Android
The most sophisticated attack ever seen on any endpoint, this modular spyware lurks on Android and iOS

Apple iPhone and iPad users usually believe they are safe. There’s no malware for iOS, they say. Apple does little to discourage the impression — the “fruit company” doesn’t even allow antivirus solutions in its App Store, because, you know, allegedly they’re not needed.

The keyword here is allegedly. There actually is malware in the wild that targets iOS users — it’s been proved a number of times, and in August 2016 researchers proved it again by revealing the existence of Pegasus, spyware capable of hacking any iPad or iPhone, harvesting data about the victim, and establishing surveillance on them. That discovery made the whole cybersecurity world… uneasy.

At our Security Analyst Summit, researchers from Lookout revealed that Pegasus exists not only for iOS, but for Android as well. The Android version is different in some ways from its iOS predecessor. Let’s shed some light on Pegasus and explain why we use the word “ultimate” to describe it.

Pegasus: The beginning
Pegasus was discovered thanks to Ahmed Mansoor, a UAE human rights activist, who happened to be one of its targets. It was a spear-phishing attack: He received several SMS messages that contained what he thought were malicious links, so he sent those messages to security experts from Citizen Lab, and they brought another cybersecurity firm, Lookout, to the investigation.

NSO has invested substantial effort in making its software difficult to detect and Pegasus infections are now very hard to identify. Security researchers suspect more recent versions of Pegasus only ever inhabit the phone’s temporary memory, rather than its hard drive, meaning that once the phone is powered down virtually all trace of the software vanishes.

One of the most significant challenges that Pegasus presents to journalists and human rights defenders is the fact that the software exploits undiscovered vulnerabilities, meaning even the most security-conscious mobile phone user cannot prevent an attack.

“This is a question that gets asked to me pretty much every time we do forensics with somebody: ‘What can I do to stop this happening again?’” said Guarnieri. “The real honest answer is nothing.”