on al jazeera, as the sun goes out, sally rush, i challenge in place to work from as a journalist, you're always pushing boundaries. part of the center of must always under love. we are the ones traveling the extra mile where other media goes, goes we go there and we give them a time to tell their story. ah, what you all just bear with me. so robin in dough hungry news stories counting is underway. anything is twice delay, general election. prime minister. aman is hoping to hold on to power in what is his 1st real electoral test? several opposition parties of boycotted the vote. a conflict in t grier and ballot shortages left hundreds of thousands of people without a chance to vote. mohammed out reports from

a polling station it as in december they walk long keels in the capital of the sub about several other cities across the country. people had started gathering some of these pulling sessions as early as 4 in the morning. these are very crucial elections. and they see us the 1st step towards the monetizing the country and they want the entire world to see it. just not a walk in progress. i mean, he is prime minister nicole passion young and to support as a celebrating their victory and sundays not parliamentary election after a bitter and divisive political campaign and has called for a national reconciliation of his civil contract party to 54 percent vote. the us says it's waiting to hear back from north korea regarding a proposal for a meeting. the american special representative follow. grand made the comment during talks with south quiz unification. minister both officials say now is

a good time to reopen discussions about killing young nuclear program. robert bryan is insult monitoring north korea reactions on us proposed talks. this is an interesting time. there have been some interesting development, especially during this visit, especially with mention of possibly scrapping the working group that exists between south korea and the united states which see is seen as a positive sign or possibly a way forward of restarting dialogue. just to give you some background, this working group was established between south korea in the united states white at the height of all of this flurry of diplomacy at the end of 2018. basically to make sure the 2 allies were singing off the same him sheets that they were proposing the same thing, things to north korea, that there wouldn't be any misunderstanding. north korea. i hate the idea of this working group describing it as a noose around the possibility of diplomacy as so the fact that they are talking

about scrapping. this is almost symbolic if you like that this belongs to the previous period of diplomacy. and then we have had interesting sounds coming out of north korea, of kim jong and saying that the north korea should be ready for both as he put in the dialogue, but also confrontation, which was seen at least as being a fairly optimistic. but since then, his influential sister, kimmy jones has given a clarification, or if you like, poured cold water on that saying that people shouldn't get ahead of themselves. that if that too much was expected, that they could indeed be disappointed. so it could well be that this is a bit of good cop bad caught by the brother and sister from north korea coming out . and that we are still seeing the possibilities at least of dialogue at some point in the future. philippines present rodriguez potente is starting to jail. people who refused to be vaccinated against crone of iris. detectives warning came during a televised address on monday, following reports of low vaccine turnouts. but health officials say, well,

people to get a job, it is voluntary. there have been 1300000 cases and 23000 deaths in the philippines . cuba health ministry has release details of its 2nd self developed code. 19 vaccine of dollar is a 3 shot vaccine which it says is 92 percent effective. cuba is facing its worst outbreak since the start of the pandemic with a record number daily infections. mexico and argentina had recalled their masses from nicaragua over present. daniel, take his increasing crackdown on opposition. more than a dozen opposition against including 5 potential presidential candidates have been arrested this month. the european union u. k. u. s. in canada have imposed sanctions on valerie after the false diversion of a plane to minsk last month. amongst those, talk to the close allies of president alexander lucas shanker, accused of fraud during masters election of violence against protest as disputing the results. those were the headlines,

low news and half. now here on out there next, the spy in your phone. i me. ah, the in mid 2020, a mobile phone belonging to odyssey or arabic, was hacked over the next few months, working with an organization called the citizen lab between promoters, era,

and picked an extraordinary story of some of the most advanced spyware in the world . and how it's used, not least on august 11th journalists, ah, with a click of a button, you can bring down nations to their news very rapidly if you so desire. and if you're willing to take them, because every system can be israel, manufacturers, pegasus, some of the most advanced spyware in the world. it 1st came to attention in 2016. since then, various governments have bought the spyware for their own use. questions today are, how does pegasus work? who is using it, and who it's victims? well, there's very little in the actual details behind the pegasus spyware. the code,

the malicious code that was used, that's very, very difficult to find out more about thought was a leslie and living again, i'm out of food because of the live a month. and then i can use, i had a more work in a dozen from mobile, have a on the in know you're out for me and i will cut off and cut the solidarity for the 3rd test on the amendment. i've had these hello, i'll just hear arabic investigative report time that followed a complicated technical process to track this infamous spyware. over many months, he had one of his own phones monitored constantly with the help of citizen land, an international research laboratory based in canada, that specializes in data surveillance. citizen la was the 1st to expose the existence of israel's pegasus spyware. in 2016,

they disclose details of what they called on exploit infrastructure. connected to a phone belonging to an activist from the united arab emirates. the infiltration, the heck led to the arrest of a madman saw remains in prison to this day. the new hacking technique was called as 0 day exploits, and pegasus was, the spyware used to infiltrate months whose phone bill must sack from citizen lab, has worked for several years to expose pegasus. so what happened in 2016 started with vis. man, i had one source, the activist in the u. e. and he noticed some suspicious messages on his phone that he was getting the s m s. he thought they were weird because they came from unknown numbers and they were promising information about human rights. so he forwarded them to me at citizen lab. we had known each other for a while. i got

a burner phone, not obviously my, my real phone burner phone and clicked on the links. and while i was doing this, i was recording the internet traffic and recording the activity on the phone and what was installed. when i clicked the link was a very sophisticated spyware payload. and the interesting question was, well, who could be behind us? who might have programmed the spyware who might have sold it, who might be using it, and the process to figure that out is called attribution. so what we did in the report is we noticed that when you clicked on the link a 2nd time, it wouldn't cause the infection is only limited to the 1st click. and the 2nd click would send you to a decoy website to try and make it look innocuous or benign. so we clicked on the 2nd time we got redirected to google, but it wasn't just any redirect to google. it was a very specific piece of code that someone had sat down and written on their computer. so we figured, well,

maybe this is part of this spyware somehow. and if we can scan the internet, we can find other servers that had the same weird redirect to google. so this is exactly what we did. we used the popular open source v map program. we scan the internet and found 149 other servers, and this is where it gets interesting because this 2nd redirect to google was also returned by 3 servers. and s o q a dot com q a n q a dot com, and mail one dot and s o group dot com and the name here. and so group we found in a brochure and these really government's website. they had a brochure for this company. and so group, which is based in israel and sells a product called pegasus, which is spyware, for mobile phones. in the case of pegasus, citizen lab did very good work and was very, very conclusively able to say that pegasus had been written by and over. but it's actually stream li,

rare that we're able to get that sort of concrete attribution and say this malware was written by this company. the n s o group is a technology company based in hatch layer in israel founded in 2010. it employs over 500 cybersecurity experts, peg as a spyware is viewed as its most important product use. israel is one of the most sophisticated cyber actors in the world. and i think that a lot of this is because the israeli army is training people to do this sort of offensive, packing for you know, in their military service. more of them allow me in the if he, how he should go home, how do you men wish that someone telephone within the huff a way the way is, is that what alaska really valia element will be?

the customer will do how to get the morocco about lira harbor was off at the thought was a little slightly r n a say, which is called unit a 200. it's pretty big. we allow them to grade companies. and we, and order for the companies to develop, they need to make what they need to make money. they need to make money. tom at miss house spoke to william benny, who for over 30 years, worked with the u. s. national security agency, a former cryptography, and later whistle block benny was the n s a technical leader of intelligence. benny has a high level understanding of the agencies data collection systems. what that means is, any i phone or any phone in the world, 1st connecting to the network, when you want to use it, you're immediately known worldwide. i mean,

all the switches have you and it capture your ip and all that and your phone and mac numbers and all that. that's how they bill you. so that also is the known by the network and the implants, computer network exploitation implants, they have around the world over this was in 2004 or 2010, somewhere in that range. they had over 50000 implants and all these switch servers and networked worldwide. i mean that means they own the entire network. so that if you, your phone comes on the air, then they can, they can know who you are and where you are. when you citizen loud, exposed to n. s. so, and it's peggy of spyware. in 2016, it attracted worldwide control, oversee and so claims its mission is to develop technology for government agencies to quote, detect and prevent terrorism and crime. however, the nature of its targets, the individuals whose phong's happy packed places,

questions about these claims. when pegasus was released a few years ago, it was mainly targeted on human rights activists, journalists, politicians, and targeted people, maybe of people with high wealth. but it's never really going to be used on the, on joe public. if you were to target everyone in math net, i don't think that would be as important to the people behind it. they didn't want to see my day today. that was your day to day going off to specific people. the danger of such spy ram is its ability to infiltrate every piece of private information and hacked a targeted device to the most used applications. in 2019 whatsapp owned by facebook accused and so of hacking the popular communications to this waste fear,

amongst the huge numbers of global users in fort sab, especially at a time when some targeted victims appeared to meet with dreadful consequences it came, shall m k law softly darville visit phone. mister mosley listen lane. the bell over so did the little house fuji j. a couple of us for lovely dogs. de la garza, my uncle, shave mon cortez my will mail the bazaar. most of them the stars i saw, nor was there. so it's not, makes me quite up on me. she never mexico visual to be the one i make. see connie, there's a lot of nozzles to hold on the layer a qu away. it will ny she a do. i will be called to mr. la la la. v oh my god do when they alarm. so if you do think that you are someone who is an important target, you're likely to face scrutiny by some government in the middle east or elsewhere.

and you are a journalist, an activist, or a member of civil society. i'd recommend that. yes. please do get in touch with, with citizen lab or other researchers who work in this space in the art about a model and michelle, i wanted to know how difficult it was to monitor a phone suspected or being hacked. and here how many a santa basically it involves installing an app on the phone, which allows us to inspect the internet traffic. and we do this for some period of time, depending on what the user would like. we can do it for a short time. we can do it for a long time and try and identify suspicious patterns or evidence that the phone might be hacked me, ah, while working as an investigative journalist, almost how was he sweats and other suspicious messages to different apps? the threats increased over the months ramping up. as he worked on more sensitive

regional subjects. he decided to install a tracking up on his work phone, developed by citizen lab to trace possible hacking the conventional way to hack a smart phone is to send a suspicious message to the targeted form that includes a short text under like when the user clicks on the link software takes control of the phone and thus makes the device accept any command sent through the link. the device has been automatically connected to a server used by the hackers, and that is how the spyware gets installed on the phone. the user doesn't see the spyware on their phone, which is already being hacked. the hackers can then control the device and all its functions. the main challenge for spyware is to find a vulnerability in the targeted phone,

particularly as modern smartphone security protection techniques have developed significantly. pegasus managed to advance this capability considerably, to be able to penetrate the various kinds of smartphone. once the infection happens, the malware itself did the same stuff that we see a lot of malware do, which is a spy on phone calls, spy on text messages, and whatsapp messages and any other encrypted messages you're sending and turn on your microphone and turn your camera what made it especially sophisticated was that they were willing to use brand new exploits for i. phones to infects their victims and some of these exploits could cost upwards of a $1000000.00 each supply packets. the spyware to its clients, cost millions of dollars, and it can only used for a limited period of time. that means targeting a large number of smartphones for long periods of time,

cost hundreds of millions of dollars. this extremely expensive cars, raises questions. who can afford this spyware? who are an esl groups, main clients, on its website, and as a group says it's spyware is quote, used exclusively by government intelligence, as efficiently requested by the governance themselves. does this mean that pegasus cannot be purchased by other parties? when people leave the israeli military service, they have all this very specialized, very highly sought after wellpaid knowledge. and so they take it to private companies such as an ogre, right? and then they, they sell it to countries that are known to violate human rights. because you know, even though they are perhaps very intelligent about computer security, they clearly haven't thought so much about the human rights implications of what

they're doing. or maybe they don't care tag us all up or teach it eat. doing that, you more likely go english means more mish doubled. she'll be the honcho may denote or of a 100 years ago on the go go. mom on the lawyer. they are the mortality. zillow, 1000, them a lot of l. i'm highs electrical law. i've got machine love, a deep, wildly hold amiable yard, and the holly or the lane, the columbia of bell, they may or may not be working on this investigation. time on this house, so many signs of hacking attempts on his phone. the one he had fitted out to track any infiltration. after 7 months, the 19th of july 2020. he received a phone call from citizen lab, informing him that the phone had been hacked. the

hacking happened a few days after he had entered an investigative documentary about an indian tie. truth which disclosed controversial leaked documents about the tie. coons linked to the us eat and his flight from the country are miss hall. had used the same phone to communicate with officials and individuals in the u. e. in order to give them the right to reply to the allegations and the film. so the 1st thing that we saw on your phone was on july 19th between about 103311288. m g m cheese. there were a very high number of connections to apple servers. now usually your phone will just communicate with one apple server for icloud, for your backups, for your contact thinking the information. but in this case, in less than an hour, we saw your phone communicate with 18 different apple servers. and this was very

unusual. you don't usually see this on phones, so that was the 1st clue. that's something suspicious was going on. and immediately after this communication stopped, we saw your phone reach out to this website regular hours dot net. in other words, your phone connected to this website, and this website stands out, because we know from our research, a citizen lab that regular ours dot net, this website is linked to an s. so group pegasus spyware. so we saw your phone reaching out to this, and if so, packets a spyware server, which led us to suspect, and then later conclude that your phone was infected. so what we can see from the recording of your internet traffic. so let's go to this point in time here, 1129, where the phone communicates with the pack us a server and we can look beforehand to see what was going on mediately before that . and the only thing that we see is this communication with i cloud with apple

servers. we don't see any evidence that you pressed on a link were clicked on anything or went to any website. so what we think happened is that these communications with the apple servers delivered the initial ex wife to have your phone. in other words, you didn't click on anything. your phone was automatically hacked, a so called 0 click, like we said 0 click exploits delivered through apple servers. this is a very expensive export. yes, this is if you think about the sophistication of exports to break into phones. this is as good as it gets 0 click means hacking, without clicking on any links. pegasus does not require any action by the user or a click on any suspicious links. the user receives a call from an unknown caller through the internet, and the phone gets hacked, even without answering the phone call. after that pegasus spyware is installed on the targeted phone. taking full control of the device was definitely the most

sophisticated attack i've seen in the last few years. the fact it was able to be installed on a target device without the target isn't clicking anything, so 0 click attack. this is incredibly impressive. and i could say very rarely seen to better do that. it so sophisticated. but as it is rare, is difficult for us to really know much more about it. and something of this method she was able to be conducted to still such data is a bit of a worry. she had struck 0 clip thomas and miss han wanted to know if the 0 click process enabled, complete access to all the applications and content. on his folder for milan island you had as far as we know, they can access everything on the phone. we saw from looking at the log files on

your phone that they were able to access the media framework so they were able to turn on the microphone turn on the camera if they wanted to, and listen into meetings or conversations going on around your device. they were also able to tap into the key chain on the front, and this is where your passwords for email accounts. social media maybe stored the fact that citizen lab was tracking thomas phone helped him take precautionary measures to prevent sensitive information being accessed. the most important thing was for him to discover the moment of the hack into place and who else was affected . we found working together with i'll just as i t team is that your case was not the only one. there were at least 36 other cases inside. i'll just a phones that we're communicating with servers that we linked to. and so groups, packets or spyware. in other words, there were many different people at all. just your who were hacked and target is

not just you all miss holland, the team from citizen lab, analyze the data connected to the hacking technology which targeted these devices. the hack appeared to be part of an organized campaigns targeting symbol teeniest, the mobile phones of dozens of just a journalist in order to spy on them. according to citizen labs technical report, israel's pegasus spyware, was used to infiltrate these phones by looking at the links and the accounts, the hacking of the phones was carried out, mainly in the u. e. and saudi arabia. the 2 countries that most use this advanced israeli technology in the region. well, what we saw with the infection inside l g 0, is that about half of them were from this operator that we call monarchy. it's

a code name that we give these operators when we refer to them inside citizen lab. and this operator is spying mostly in saudi arabia and cutter, but not very many other countries. so this tells us, well, if they're spying mostly in saudi arabia, maybe it is, in fact, the saudi arabian government and the other half were from this other operator that we call smithy castro inside citizen lab. and this operator seems to be mostly targeting inside the united arab emirates and color. so this tells us that the government, in this case may be the united arab emirates government. in other words, to different governments. it looks like we're behind this campaign, ah, deals to purchase pegasus spyware on no longer a secret. many reports claim that saudi arabia and the u. e. have spent hundreds of millions of us dollars to buy packages from israel. such deals seemed to be

reinforced after the recent us brokers so called normalization deal between the us and israel ah. across the world, young activists and organizers around them are motivated and politically engaged. we were the one who had lights on what was going on. and the way the more means to me did the generation change is al jazeera is looking at the fresh ideas for the transformation of global politics. the day we do the work of making sure that our voice groups are heard coming soon. phone al, jazeera, a global pandemic, social unrest, a world under locked down, brought to a need by the buyers. but now we have a window to like the path to

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roof. we could see the recreation at the american embassy, where the most iconic images of the conflict in vietnam were transmitted to the world. this was the front row seat to the final stages of the war saigon, caravel, a new episode of war hotels on al jazeera. ah hello, i'm fully battle in doha. with the headlines on al jazeera counting is underway, me feel p has twice delayed general election. prime minister i'll be made is hoping to hold on to power in what is his 1st really electoral test? several opposition parties have we kind of devote a conflict in te grey and ballot shortages left hundreds of thousands of people without a chance to vote. mom and i do reports from

a police polling station in august about their walk, long queues of the in the capital at the sub about several other cities across the country. people had started gathering some of these pulling sessions for a.