Oh great, now I’ve gotta check my phone for Pegasus spyware?
Barely a couple of days have passed since the revelation of the infamous Pegasus spyware being used to snoop on journalists and politicians in several countries. Now, there’s a tool from Amnesty International to check if your phone has been infected with it. Impressive and alarming all at once.
TechCrunch’s Zack Whittaker has the dirt on this; you’ll need to use a command line interface for now, take a backup of your iPhone or Android device files, and let the program do its thing. Oh, and you’ll want to watch out for false positives when you look through the files identified by the toolkit on your desktop.
Do you need to run this on your phone too? It’s hard to say: findings from the investigation have only begun to be revealed, and we don’t yet know a lot about where this data — which includes 50,000 allegedly targeted phone numbers — came from. But it’s got me thinking about how countries carry out surveillance on their own citizens, and just how worried we should be about these measures and their oversight.
