Since the revelations about the Pegasus spyware having been used to snoop on more than a hundred Indians, many are justifiably worried.
You may think that if you are doing things that the government or powerful interests may not like, then it may seem like all the more reason to arrive at the decision that because you cannot do anything about the snooping, it is best to stop using your phone or stop communication altogether.
Some may feel equally justified in reaching the conclusion that you should forget about security and go about your business seeing that you cannot protect yourself any way.It is true that it is very, very hard to protect yourself against a hack like this. Perhaps not with Pegasus, which has probably run aground, but other hacks of this kind will most likely occur again.
But that does not mean you should give up on either communicating, or on communicating securely.Because the reality is that while you may not be able stop an attack like this, you can do a lot to mitigate surveillance in general. And if you do that, you will also mitigate the consequences, should you suffer a Pegasus style attack.
Let’s start by noting that attacks like Pegasus, by their very nature, are rarely conducted against large numbers of targets.Some have noted that Pegasus is very expensive, but that is not the fundamental reason.
Pegasus is a targeted individual hack that seeks to break the protections built into computer and phone operating systems. All hacks like this follow the same method. They rely on finding what are known as “zero day vulnerabilities”, namely bugs in a software that even the developer does not know about (hence “zero day”, as in zero days of warning).
This bug is then used to infiltrate the operating system of the phone or computer, and from there to monitor and attack other software. Use of zero days makes Pegasus-style attacks almost impossible to stop in advance....READ MORE
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