When an Israeli entrepreneur went into a meeting with the infamous spyware vendor NSO, company representatives asked him if it would be OK for them to demo their powerful and expensive spying software, known as Pegasus, on his own phone.
The entrepreneur, who spoke to Motherboard on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the meeting, agreed, but said that NSO would have to target his other iPhone, which he brought with him and had a foreign phone number. He gave NSO that phone number and put the phone on the desk.
After “five or seven minutes,” the contents of his phone’s screen appeared on a large display that was set up in the meeting room, all without him even clicking on a malicious link, he said.
“I see clicking on all kinds of icons: email icon, SMS icon, and other icons,” he told Motherboard. “And suddenly I saw all my messages in there and I saw all the email in there and they were capable to open any information that was on my [iPhone].”
The entrepreneur added that
the NSO representatives accessed the microphone and the camera on his iPhone. That demonstration highlighted the power of an increasingly popular product among governments:
software for remotely hacking phones in order to access communications and other data from targets.
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UPDATE
Pegasus malware officially a global brand.
NSO Group's
Pegasus surveillanceware
has been on the market for around two years, and now researchers say
the spyware has a global reach that would make most multinational
corporations jealous.
CitizenLab reports
that its latest analysis of the malware has found it operating in some
45 countries, usually in the hands of governments looking to keep tabs
on its citizens.
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If someone is stealing your company's secrets, U.S. Attorney William M. McSwain wants to hear from you... 
