In recent years, commercial spyware has been deployed by more actors against a wider range of victims, but the prevailing narrative has still been that the malware is used in targeted attacks against an extremely small number of people. At the same time, though, it has been difficult to check devices for infection, leading individuals to navigate an ad hoc array of academic institutions and NGOs that have been on the front lines of developing forensic techniques to detect mobile spyware. On Tuesday, the mobile device security firm iVerify is publishing findings from a spyware detection feature it launched in May. Of 2,500 device scans that the company’s customers elected to submit for inspection, seven revealed infections by the notorious NSO Group malware known as Pegasus.
The company’s Mobile Threat Hunting feature uses a combination of malware signature-based detection, heuristics, and machine learning to look for anomalies in iOS and Android device activity or telltale signs of spyware infection. For paying iVerify customers, the tool regularly checks devices for potential compromise. But the company also offers a free version of the feature for anyone who downloads the iVerify Basics app for $1. These users can walk through steps to generate and send a special diagnostic utility file to iVerify and receive analysis within hours. Free users can use the tool once a month. iVerify’s infrastructure is built to be privacy-preserving, but to run the Mobile Threat Hunting feature, users must enter an email address so the company has a way to contact them if a scan turns up spyware—as it did in the seven recent Pegasus discoveries.
“The really fascinating thing is that the people who were targeted were not just journalists and activists, but business leaders, people running commercial enterprises, people in government positions,” says Rocky Cole, chief operating officer of iVerify and a former US National Security Agency analyst. “It looks a lot more like the targeting profile of your average piece of malware or your average APT group than it does the narrative that’s been out there that mercenary spyware is being abused to target activists. It is doing that, absolutely, but this cross section of society was surprising to find.”
Seven out of 2,500 scans may sound like a small group, especially in the somewhat self-selecting customer base of iVerify users, whether paying or free, who want to be monitoring their mobile device security at all, much less checking specifically for spyware. But the fact that the tool has already found a handful of infections at all speaks to how widely the use of spyware has proliferated around the world. Having an easy tool for diagnosing spyware compromises may well expand the picture of just how often such malware is being used.
“NSO Group sells its products exclusively to vetted US & Israel-allied intelligence and law enforcement agencies,” NSO Group spokesperson Gil Lainer told WIRED in a statement. “Our customers use these technologies daily.”
iVerify says that it took significant investment to develop the detection tool because mobile operating systems like Android, and particularly iOS, are more locked down than traditional desktop operating systems and don’t allow monitoring software to have kernel access at the heart of the system. Cole says that the crucial insight was to use telemetry taken from as close to the kernel as possible to tune machine learning models for detection. Some spyware, like Pegasus, also has characteristic traits that make it easier to flag. In the seven detections, Mobile Threat Hunting caught Pegasus using diagnostic data, shutdown logs, and crash logs. But the challenge, Cole says, is in refining mobile monitoring tools to reduce false positives.
Developing the detection capability has already been invaluable, though. Cole says that it helped iVerify identify signs of compromise on the smartphone of Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, a lawyer and Sikh political activist who was the target of an alleged, foiled assassination attempt by an Indian government employee in New York City. The Mobile Threat Hunting feature also flagged suspected nation state activity on the mobile devices of two Harris-Walz campaign officials—a senior member of the campaign and an IT department member—during the presidential race.
“The age of assuming that iPhones and Android phones are safe out of the box is over,” Cole says. “The sorts of capabilities to know if your phone has spyware on it were not widespread. There were technical barriers and it was leaving a lot of people behind. Now you have the ability to know if your phone is infected with commercial spyware. And the rate is much higher than the prevailing narrative.”
Updated at 12:12 pm EST, December 4, 2024, to include a statement from NSO Group.
