Pegasus has a competitor. It’s a product from QuaDream
It turns out that the allegations against the Israeli company NSO Group, accusing it of producing and selling spyware on smartphones, may be the beginning of a wider scandal. In recent days, similar charges have been brought against another Israeli company that also produces similar tools to hack Apple smartphones.
It’s about QuaDream, written by Reuters news agency. According to her, when designing a tool to attack the iPhone, computer scientists at QuaDream exploited the same vulnerability as Pegasus. QuaDream is smaller than the NSO Group, but like the NSO Group, it has already sold this dangerous hacking software to governments around the world.
Research has shown that both companies use the same highly sophisticated zero-click attack known as ForcedEntry. The expression “zero click” means that the owner of the smartphone is virtually defenseless, because it is vulnerable to attacks even when he does not click on anything, open any application or email and does not activate any function.
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After such an attack, the smartphone becomes almost transparent and the hacker gains access to all of its resources. So it can read emails and instant messages, intercept calls or turn on the camera and microphone and follow the actions of the smartphone owner via the Internet.
So far, it is not known if Apple has taken any legal action in this matter, as was the case with NSO Group. We know that Apple filed a lawsuit against it, claiming that the Israeli company violated the terms of use of its smartphones. It is difficult to say whether it will be similar in the case of QuaDream. However, we know that shortly after the discovery of the ForcedEntry vulnerability, Apple IT professionals developed a patch to modify the iOS system that eliminates it.
