A New York Times reporter claims that a hacker was able to access his iPhone after texting him, even though he never clicked on the message in question.
Ben Hubbard, a NYT reporter covering the Middle East, said in an article in the New York newspaper that hackers used a so-called "zero-click exploit" to break into his phone in 2020 and 2021.
Experts say that simply receiving an iMessage sent by a hacker using this exploit may be enough to leave users' personal data exposed.
"It's like being robbed by a ghost," Hubbard wrote disconsolately.
After consulting with Citizen Lab - a spyware research institute - Hubbard was able to trace the origin of the text of a spyware called Pegasus. The software was created by the Israel-based software developer NSO group and has already been linked to cell phone hacks, although the company routinely denies the allegations.
The software appears to have been used in the past by the Saudi Arabian government in an attempt to hack Hubbard, possibly due to the fact that he often reported on the Middle Eastern country and also wrote a novel about Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the Middle East. Country that allegedly ordered the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi for his critical reports on the Saudi government. Based on this, Hubbard believes Saudi Arabia is most likely behind the two zero-click exploits.
The facts related by the New York newspaper correspondent are particularly troubling for a number of reasons.
First, he shows how sophisticated the tools used by hackers have become in recent years. Now it is no longer enough to avoid suspicious links; your personal data is at risk if you simply receive a text message. Apple has tried to update the security of its phones to protect itself from these new threats, but the results are not seen.
Secondly, "the idea that government agencies can hack the phones of private citizens and journalists to spy on them is in itself incredibly disconcerting," writes Futurism, full of constitutional outrage.
However, let us remember well that the dangers in the cyber world in which obtorto neck have immersed us do not come from outside, but can be contained even within the operating system that we update. As reported by Renovatio 21, with the universal justification of COVID, in one of the latest iOS updates there was software to monitor the status of the COVID-19 infection.
Nothing and nobody is safe with computer technology.
After all, that's why they imposed it on us.