Cyber experts find proof of Pegasus use on phones, inform SC panel: Report

Two cyber-security researchers have reportedly found concrete evidence of the use of the Israeli spyware Pegasus on the phones of some petitioners in India. 

The two researchers have deposed before the Supreme-court appointed committee investigating the Pegasus issue. One of them told The Indian Express that he assessed iPhones of seven of the petitioners, and used a forensic tool to find at least two to be infected with the malware. He shared the findings as well as his methods to the top court in an affidavit to the apex court. 

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“Multiple entries going back to March 2021 indicating that the Pegasus malware tried to delete entries from the process table databases,” he said in the affidavit.

The second researcher looked at Android devices of six petitioners and found the malware in all of the phones. Four devices, particularly, had distinct versions of the virus and two had variants of the original version. 

“We have an emulator for Android on which we verified that it has all the variants of the malware. What we found is that this (malware) is so virulent that it could not have been used for legitimate purposes. It not only reads your chats, it can get your videos, turn the audio or video at any time,” he told The Indian Express. 

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After around a dozen petitions filed against the alleged snooping by the government, the Supreme Court on October 27 had appointed an independent committee headed by retired Justice RV Raveendran, along with two experts.

The three-judge bench, headed by Chief Justice NV Ramana had said that the state cannot get “a free pass every time the spectre of ‘national security’ is raised”, as it ordered a “thorough inquiry” into allegations of unauthorised surveillance using Pegasus.

Earlier last week, the New York Times had reported that the Indian government bought Israeli spyware Pegasus in 2017 as part of a $2-billion package for weapons including a missile system.

Pegasus, a spyware designed by the Israel-based NSO Group, can reportedly infect smartphones without the users’ knowledge and gain virtual access to all their data.

A global media investigation, dubbed the Pegasus Project, involving several leading media publications from all over the world, disclosed that 300 phones from India were on a list of potential targets on the leaked database of NSO. It was not established that all the phones were hacked.

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The list of names featured journalists, politicians, lawyers, activists, a Supreme Court judge and others.

NSO maintains that its spyware is only used by governments for the purposes of security and counterterrorism. Last week, Israeli government authorities raided offices of the NSO gro