Cyberespionage: Apple boosts iPhone security after Israeli spyware reveals startling weaknesses

Apple Logo at the Apple Store in Paris (photo by Serge Attal/Flash90)

By Times of Israel Staff and AP

NSO Group, founded by alumni of elite IDF intelligence unit 8200, developed never-before-seen cyberespionage software capable of completely overtaking devices

An Israeli digital arms company has prompted tech giant Apple to boost security for its mobile operating system after developing a highly sophisticated spyware package that allows complete control of iPhone devices.

The spyware — code-named Pegasus — took advantage of previously undisclosed weaknesses in Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 9.3.5., according to reports published Thursday by the San Francisco-based Lookout smartphone security company and internet watchdog group Citizen Lab.

The software can track calls and contacts, collect passwords, read text messages and emails, record calls and trace the whereabouts of the user.

The culprit, according to the reports by Lookout and Citizen Lab, is the NSO Group, an Israeli company with a reputation for flying under the radar.

“We realized that we were looking at something that no one had ever seen in the wild before,” said Mike Murray, a researcher with Lookout, in an interview with Motherboard. “Literally a click on a link to jailbreak an iPhone in one step. One of the most sophisticated pieces of cyberespionage software we’ve ever seen.”

The reports issued by Lookout and Citizen Lab — based at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs — outlined how an iPhone could be completely compromised with the tap of a finger, a trick so coveted in the world of cyberespionage that in November a spyware broker said it had paid a $1 million dollar bounty to programmers who’d found a way to do it.

Arie van Deursen, a professor of software engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, said both reports were credible and disturbing. Forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski described the malicious program as a “serious piece of spyware.”

The NSO Group was founded in Herzliya in 2010 by Omri Lavie and Shalev Hulio, alumni of the elite IDF intelligence unit 8200, according to Forbes. The company was bought two years ago — for $120 million — by San Francisco-based Francisco Partners Management LLC but maintains an office in Israel, staffed mainly with Israelis… Read full article at: Apple boosts iPhone security after Israeli spyware reveals startling weaknesses | The Times of Israel