A Spy in Your Pocket: How Phone Hacking by Mercenary Spyware Firms Threaten Global Privacy

“ In Part 2 of our interview with Ronald Deibert, director of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, he describes how they discovered a massive security flaw that was being exploited by the Israeli-based NSO Group to infect Apple iPhones and other devices with its Pegasus spyware. Deibert also describes how people can try to protect their devices from such security exploits, and the push to halt sales of this type of spyware. Deibert is the author of “Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society.”

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Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we bring you Part 2 of our conversation about this epic Apple correction that has been made. Apple has released an emergency software update to fix a security flaw in its iPhones and other products researchers found was being exploited by the Israeli-based NSO Group to infect the devices with its Pegasus spyware. Over 1.65 billion Apple products in use around the globe were vulnerable to the spyware since at least March. Apple said vulnerable devices could be hacked by receiving a malicious PDF file that users didn’t even have to click. It’s known as a “zero-click” exploit.

The flaw was discovered by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which found the hack in the iPhone records of a Saudi political activist. Earlier this year, a massive data leak revealed Pegasus software had targeted the phones of thousands of journalists, activists and political figures around the world for foreign governments and NSO Group clients.

So, we’re continuing our conversation now with Ronald Deibert. He is the director of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. His book is called Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society.

So, let’s continue, Ron. If you could talk about, first of all, what this “zero-click” exploit is, for laypeople who can’t even understand that, but how so many phones, iPhones, iPads, got infected, and how people can protect themselves?…”