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Comment by NiceWayToDoIT | Hacker News Reader

In all this I am thinking about scale, and how many political leaders are using same tool to spy their political opponents? I am thinking about just a few countries in which governments have discretionary right not do disclose how and where they spending tax money to the public.

Does anyone know's technically how is this tool exactly deployed, in the sense what prevents Chinese intelligence using same tool to spy on US officials?

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The US and Israeli governments approve the sales according to news articles I've found: so one thing preventing China from using Pegasus is the US government not green-lighting it.

Additionally: you can count on China already having comparable technology anyway.

I guess once you have a phone it would not be too difficult to do reverse engineering, but I am still confused with level of vulnerability SMS / WhatUp / IMessage what does it mean a link other type "unknown" zero-day !?

It is very odd, on one side governments complaining about other govs are hacking and safty, and at the same time requesting back-doors from tech giants, all the while tech people are saying "crying at loud you cannot have both at the same time", and this is going on for past 20 years ...

> The US and Israeli governments approve the sales according to news articles I've found

Link to this news article, please.

Most likely the base/server tool "calls home". i.e. there is a client loaded on the target device, there is a server at the gov agency. The server has number of uses and targets. When the uses are exhausted, it phones home to NSO Group.

This is very much the model for other spyware tools, forensic tools, and phone repair tools.

This would also work well with the objection that they "don't have servers in Cyprus".

It also explain how NSO Group would know how many targets the tool maybe loaded on, but not actually have the list.

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