Pegasus

We found interesting DNS cache hits on this system in Syria, Lebanon, Qatar, the Netherlands, and the United States, but did not have enough information to determine whether these might be suspected infections. We found interesting DNS cache hits on this system in Syria and Lebanon, but did not have enough information to determine whether these might be suspected infections. When a user or a computer program instructs a computer or mobile device to communicate with a domain name e.

By default, the device communicates with a DNS server maintained by the ISP or telecom company to which the device is connected. DNS servers cache mappings between IP addresses and domain names temporarily, typically for a duration specified by the owner of the domain name e. One can also send a query to a DNS server with the Recursion Desired flag set to 0 called a nonrecursive query , indicating to the server that it should only consult its cache before responding; if the record is not in the cache, the server should not contact other servers to attempt to resolve the domain and should not add anything to its cache.

Some DNS servers may choose to not respect this flag. The author of the original presentation of DNS cache probing in framed it as detrimental to security and privacy and proposed that operators of DNS servers, such as ISPs, should block DNS queries not originating from their own network. Implementing such a precaution would make it harder for a single observer to directly probe caches of DNS servers. An open DNS forwarder is a service that accepts queries from any Internet user, and forwards the query, unmolested, perhaps to an ISP server, which then responds to the forwarder, which in turn responds to the user.

In keeping with the growing emphasis on ethics in network measurement research, we considered the impacts of our technical activities on persons that are not the targets of our research, and sought to minimize the likelihood of any disruption. Notably we examined the possibility of costs to users, service disruption, or unwanted warnings from their ISPs. We believe that this research was conducted in a manner that mitigates these risks, and serves the public interest. Firstly, we considered the possibility that users might incur costs or service disruption as a result of our DNS Cache Probing.

We believe that this is a highly unlikely outcome, given the small number of requests made during the activity. As deployed, the technique results in fewer than one request per second per IP address, and thus is less than one kilobyte per second. The total traffic is thus less than megabytes per day. To further minimize load on the authoritative name servers for the domains that we are probing, we use nonrecursive queries only.

As a result, we do not anticipate costs incurred by users, or bandwidth degradation. We determined that it was unlikely that users would receive unwelcome inquiries from their ISPs, or other authorities, as the result of our DNS cache probing. Such high-volume attacks might come to the notice of ISPs or other authorities and trigger inquiries or sanction by ISPs. DNS Cache Probing, in contrast, is a very low-volume activity. At the time of writing, we are unaware of any evidence of DNS Cache Probing used in malicious real-world attacks. As the technique of DNS Cache Probing continues to be developed as a research tool, it will be important to ensure that it continues to be used in ways that do not present privacy and security concerns.

We first develop a list of suitable DNS forwarders. We run three tests to answer the following questions:. DNS cache probing can produce false positives , i. This can happen in the following three cases:. We conducted several control experiments to determine how best to exclude false positives.

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In our control experiments, we selected 50 domain names with a wildcard record and an authoritative TTL of at least seconds, then generated a random string to use as a subdomain, and continuously queried all 50 domains with the subdomain on all resolvers once roughly every seconds in a fixed order, at a rate ensuring each domain was queried at least once every seconds. We ran the experiment for 24 hours. Any results we received during the control experiments we treated as false positives. We developed a set of heuristics to reduce the false positive rate to 0 in these experiments, with the idea that these same heuristics might help us eliminate many false positives from our DNS cache probing study of the spyware domains.

These are the conditions we applied to eliminate false positives from our results:. Our conditions for excluding results were very liberal, and could result in false negatives. Note that when we say we excluded a response, we mean that the response was not included as a final result. We continued to consider excluded responses as reasons to exclude other responses.

There are many reasons a domain name may be in a cache assuming we did not accidentally put it there. We are only interested in cache entries that might arise from suspected infections. After reports concerning the use of Pegasus spyware were published by Amnesty International and Citizen Lab on August 1, , a staged shutdown of the Pegasus infrastructure was conducted over a period of several days. At first, the bulk of frontend domains appeared to be shut down, while a handful of final domains usually two remained active for each operator.

We did not identify any operator for which our DNS cache probing technique reported hits on different subsets of size 2 from the final domains. We queried domains at least once per their period of authoritative TTL. Because of the large number of domains and servers, and our desire to conserve bandwidth, we alternated which domains we were probing. Each domain name was probed for at least three hour periods. Factors such as the use of VPNs and satellite Internet connections may skew our geolocation results.

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Thus, the country mapping should serve as a guide for further investigation, rather than ironclad evidence of monitoring. Additionally, it is possible that unusual configurations of DNS forwarders such as the use of consistent hashing to consult different resolvers for different domain names could defeat our filtering techniques and introduce false positives.

We are not sure what percentage of all DNS queries are observable by our method and note that the percentage could vary greatly across different countries and ISPs. Therefore, it is possible that our technique has missed a significant number of infections and may have failed to measure certain countries or ISPs entirely. Importantly, operators that appear in our results to be operating in a single country may actually be operating in multiple countries.

This report identifies 45 countries with suspected Pegasus spyware infections operated by at least 33 likely NSO customers. The resulting global map of NSO Pegasus infections reveals several issues of urgent concern. Three Pegasus operators appear to be operational in Mexico, despite the extensive evidence of abuses of Pegasus to target Mexican civil society uncovered by Citizen Lab and our partners in The findings of widespread targeting in Mexico led to international outcry and a criminal investigation.

However, they do not appear to have resulted in the termination of all of the Pegasus operations in that country. Despite this disclosure and resulting public outcry, it appears that a suspected UAE-based Pegasus deployment remains operational. Most recently, a Saudi Arabia-linked campaign appears to be continuing, despite a recent investigation linking it to the targeting of an Amnesty International staff member and a Saudi activist. Bahrain, another country that may host a Pegasus operator, has a notorious history of abusing spyware to target civil society.

The Togo-linked operator also appears to be using politically-themed domains. Togo has a history of authoritarian rule and human rights abuses. Ten Pegasus operators appear to be conducting surveillance in multiple countries. The scope of this activity suggests that government-exclusive spyware is widely used to conduct activities that may be illegal in the countries where the targets are located.

For example, we have identified several possible Pegasus customers not linked to the United States, but with infections in US IP space. While some of these infections may reflect usage of out-of-country VPN or satellite Internet service by targets, it is possible that several countries may be actively violating United States law by penetrating devices located within the US.

They also suggest that the company has a significant number of customers that maintain active infections in other countries, likely violating those countries laws. The global market for government exclusive spyware continues to grow, and as it does, more governments and security services with histories of abuse will acquire this technology. The expanding user base of spyware like Pegasus will enable a growing number of authoritarian states to pry into into the digital lives of their own citizens, but also into phones and computers in pockets and purses around the globe.

Omri Lavrie and Mr. Shalev Hulio, notifying them of the details of this report, explaining that we had shared an embargoed copy with journalists and offering to publish in full any response they wished to communicate on the record. On 14 September , Mr. There are varying tales about how Bellerophon found Pegasus; the most common [9] being that the hero was told by Polyeidos to sleep in the temple of Athena , where the goddess visited him in the night and presented him with a golden bridle.

The next morning, still clutching the bridle, Bellerophon found Pegasus drinking at the Pierian spring, caught him and eventually tamed him. Michaud's Biographie universelle relates that when Pegasus was born, he flew to where thunder and lightning are released. Then, according to certain versions of the myth, Athena tamed him and gave him to Perseus, who flew to Ethiopia to help Andromeda.

In fact, Pegasus is a late addition to the story of Perseus, who flew on his own with the sandals lent to him by Hermes. Because of his years of faithful service to Zeus, Pegasus was later honoured with transformation into a constellation. During World War II , the silhouetted image of Bellerophon the warrior, mounted on the winged Pegasus, was adopted by the United Kingdom 's newly raised parachute troops in as their upper sleeve insignia.

The image clearly symbolized a warrior arriving at a battle by air, the same tactics used by paratroopers. One source suggests that the insignia was designed by famous English novelist Daphne du Maurier , who was wife of the commander of the 1st Airborne Division and later the expanded British Airborne Forces , General Frederick "Boy" Browning.

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The maroon background on the insignia was later used again by the Airborne Forces when they adopted the famous maroon beret in Summer Today's Parachute Regiment carries on the maroon beret tradition. In it was announced that the units of 16 Air Assault Brigade would once again use the Pegasus insignia after a year hiatus.

During the airborne phase of the Normandy invasion on the night of 5—6 June , British 6th Airborne Division captured all its key objectives in advance of the seaborne assault, including the capture and holding at all costs of a vital bridge over the Caen Canal , near Ouistreham.

In memory of their tenacity, the bridge has been known ever since as Pegasus Bridge. The winged horse is still featured on the Tuscan flag and coat of arms.

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The winged horse has provided an instantly recognizable corporate logo or emblem of inspiration. Mobil Oil has had a Pegasus as its company logo since its affiliation with Magnolia Petroleum Company in the s. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the naiad, the water nymph, see Pegasis.

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For other uses, see Pegasus disambiguation. For other uses, see Winged horse disambiguation. This article may be expanded with text translated from the corresponding article in French. March Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the French article. Machine translation like Deepl or Google Translate is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.

Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary using German: Content in this edit is translated from the existing German Wikipedia article at [[: Exact name of German article]]; see its history for attribution.

For more guidance, see Wikipedia: Pegasus in popular culture. Studia Onomastica et Indogermanica Commentary was provided by R. Beekes in his Etymological Dictionary of Greek , Brill, , p. However, he had a like-sounding name, and Greek visitors to Cilicia may have connected their existing Pegasus with Zeus 's lightning after hearing about this 'Pihassassi' and his functions and assuming, wrongly, he was their own Pegasus in a foreign land. Mayfield Publishing , Retrieved 23 June