History continues to show that the coup plotter Pedro Castillo he was willing to break the law on more than one occasion. As is known, the Special Team of the Prosecutor’s Office against Corruption in Power captured Jorge Hernández, alias ‘El Español’, who was Castillo’s operator on Tuesday the 7th. With his arrest, it became known that the former president requested the creation of a shadow intelligence group capable of sucking, discrediting and attacking anyone who stands in his way. To achieve this he had to acquire the well-known Israeli intelligence software Pegasus.
LOOK: Pedro Castillo asked to create and tried to finance a parallel intelligence group
This program was created by the Israeli company NSO Group with the purpose of preventing and investigating crimes of organized crime and terrorism. They currently export and sell their software to other countries regulated by the Israeli Ministry of Defense and only sell it to other governments through legal channels. To use it, governments have to buy a certain number of licenses from the Israeli government: for each license purchased, only one mobile device can be infected.
Website of the Israeli company NSO Group, creator of the Pegasus software.
Pegasus is capable of violating the security of a cell phone to get into the personal information of applications such as WhatsApp, Telegram, text messages, calls, photos, bank accounts, GPS location, etc. In this way, it manages to turn the mobile into a remote surveillance point since it can access all the information it contains from anywhere in the world. The most striking thing about Pegasus is that its system is imperceptible to the human eye, so whoever has it on their cell phone won’t notice it.
Used in at least 5 governments in Europe, in addition to countries such as Saudi Arabia and Mexico, the software has put people in important positions of great responsibility such as businessmen and public officials in trouble. A transcendental case was the alleged espionage of which the President of France Emmanuel Macron and other of his ministers would have been subjected during 2021 and behind which, according to what the press revealed at the time, would be Morocco.
Likewise, in Mexico they denounced the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador because, according to intelligence documentation, the armed forces spied on journalists and human rights defenders who were investigating complaints against soldiers who had shot innocent people.
How does Pegasus work?
The Citizen Lab institute of the University of Toronto in Canada was able to identify how the Pegasus software works and, as mentioned in a report, it all starts with sending an SMS message to the cell phone of the person you want to spy on, so that this is cheated and enter the external link sent. It is worth mentioning that there is a possibility that the user does not fall for the strategy and the purchased license is no longer functional.
They point out that sometimes the message includes information or data close to the person, so that it is possible to persuade them with a manipulation technique used by cybercriminals known as “social engineering”.
Once the user enters the link, the browser redirects him to one of the NSO Group websites and immediately the Pegasus software is installed on the mobile phone to have access to all the files on the device, such as videos, photos, messages , emails and contact list, whether encrypted or not. In addition, it allows you to activate the cell phone’s microphone and camera imperceptibly at any time.
