In English: Interview about NSO Group’s Spyware

Prof. Eran Toch from the Faculty of Engineering at Tel Aviv University criticized the Marari Committee's focus only on legal aspects of the use of Pegasus. "The problem here is that the Marari report ignores in a very significant way a technological analysis of the spyware, and it treats them as a type of eavesdropping, only with a different technology," he explained. "But that's not the case. The use of spyware is completely different from traditional tapping, beyond the issue of the additional information that can be extracted and the time window in which the information can be obtained. Both violate privacy, but infection with malicious software requires intrusion into the phone, an intrusion that is largely based on deceiving the person who operates the phone (the 'target'), and requires him to click on a link or run certain software. "The report claims that the characteristics of each spyware system be checked separately (which makes sense), but it really does not continue this line of thought, and does not report how the tools that were used manage to break into phones. In general, it can be said that using spyware is much more similar to breaking into a house, while establishing fraud, than for wiretapping. The report makes a distinction, without foundation in my view, between computer search authority and wiretapping, but in the case of spying, there really is no such difference. Intrusions into the phone are most often based on weak points in the cellular operating system we use, and contrary to the house metaphor, exploiting such a weak point is also harmful to the security of all of our information, because weak points do not usually remain secret, and trickle down to criminal entities."