Pegasus
The Story of the World's Most Dangerous Spyware
-
- $8.99
Publisher Description
Pegasus is almost certainly the most powerful piece of spyware ever developed. Installed by as little as a missed WhatsApp call, once on your phone it can record your calls, copy your messages, steal your photos and secretly film you. Those that control it can find out your daily movements: exactly where you’ve been, and who you’ve met.
From a wayward princess who married into the royal family of Dubai; to the president of one of the most powerful and long-standing Republics in Europe; and a reporter investigating arms deals being negotiated by the government of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and the Trump administration: these three individuals and many more have been targeted by Pegasus – with sometimes deadly consequences.
The personal data of the victims is captured by their own governments, foreign governments and even by private criminal enterprises. They have become, in an instant, vulnerable to blackmail, intimidation, false imprisonment and assassination. Some have already suffered these fates.
Pegasus by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud investigates how people’s lives and privacy are being threatened as cyber-surveillance occurs with exponentially increasing frequency across the world, at a sweep and scale that astounds – and horrifies.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An international consortium of journalists exposes a shocking cybersecurity threat in this riveting investigation. Richard and Rigaud, the founder and editor-in-chief, respectively, of Forbidden Stories, a nonprofit committed to pursuing and publishing the unfinished work of reporters who have been murdered, jailed, or otherwise threatened, explain that in 2020, their organization and Amnesty International received a leaked list of 50,000 cell phone numbers selected for possible targeting by Pegasus, a cybersurveillance system capable of hijacking any mobile device connected to Wi-Fi "without raising the tiniest of red flags." NSO Group, the Israeli company that developed Pegasus, claimed the software was only licensed by sovereign states and "used for law enforcement and intelligence purposes," but investigators eventually discovered that the list included phone numbers belonging to human rights advocates, nearly 200 journalists, French president Emmanuel Macron, and Hatice Cengiz, the fiancée of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, among others. Richard and Rigaud briskly detail how reporters and cybersecurity experts determined which devices had actually been attacked or infected, debunking NSO cofounder Shalev Hulio's repeated claims that Pegasus had not been used against Khashoggi or his loved ones. Lucid explanations of technical and legal matters and vivid profiles of crusading journalists enrich this cautionary tale of technology run amok.
