Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy

by Laurent Richard

“Remember, when you say, ‘I want one iMessage exploit, it’s never one exploit,” he explained. “When an iPhone gets compromised with an iMessage exploit, they are using maybe three, four, five different exploits packaged in one. “There’s so many things that [NSO technicians] have to compromise with an iPhone that make it a lot more complicated. They need to compromise a number of [different] security measures that Apple put into place purposely to add layers of complications before you can successfully get complete ownership of the device. “The difficulty with compromising an iPhone is that you have to have a functioning exploit for all of these different security layers and all of it be reliable and working at once. They have to subvert all these other components of the operating system. One of them might get patched in the night, and they need to find something else to replace that one. So it’s just not that straightforward. It’s a pretty complex process.”