The Mobile Verification Toolkit (MVT) developed by Researchers at Amnesty International can be used to detect if Pegasus Spyware has targeted your phone, Tech Crunch reported.
The toolkit that was developed by Amnesty to enable users to check for malicious apps that may have infected their devices can be used to find out if the Pegasus spyware developed by Israel’s NSO Group to snoop in on journalists, ministers, and businessmen, has extracted data from your phone too.
Amnesty International, along with Paris-based journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories, carried out technical and forensic analysis of dozens of infected phones to ascertain if Pegasus had extracted data from those devices.
Amnesty found more forensic traces of Pegasus, which can infect devices without requiring the victim to interact with a malicious link, in iPhones than in Android devices.
How to use MVT to detect possible Pegasus infection?
MVT takes the entire iPhone backup and scouts for any indicators of compromise (IOCs) that are known to be used by NSO to deliver Pegasus. In case your iPhone backup is encrypted, MVT can decrypt it without making a separate copy.
For the MVT to start scanning your phone, the user will have to feed in Amnesty’s IOCs available on its GitHub page. Each time the signs of compromise file updates, download an up-to-date copy.
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