Starkly summarized by Forbes, “Pegasus is military-grade spyware that can remotely hack into mobile phones and take control of the device. Once Pegasus secretly infects a phone, it can copy messages, photos, emails, record calls and activate microphones and cameras for continuous surveillance without the owner’s knowledge. This lets Pegasus transform personal phones into 24/7 monitoring tools for prying government eyes.”
Simply, military-grade spyware demands military-grade defense. The Sotera SecurePhone is just that, using the same operating system that secures the United States nuclear arsenal. So, it’s not by chance that it has never been infected by Pegasus spyware or had any vulnerabilities in 20+ years of deployment.
Despite warnings from Digital Experts at Access Now and the University of Toronto’s non- profit Citizen Lab that the unchecked spread of cyber weapons like Pegasus pose a dire threat to human rights worldwide, no other mobile device – other than the Sotera SecurePhone – is 100% protected.
In September 2023, Apple acknowledged a system flaw in their devices that is ‘actively exploited’ to deliver malware onto iPhones and iPads, exposing the need for a major security update. In an ongoing game of cat and mouse, the emergency patch was issued after the weakness in the iOS code, zero-day, “appeared to have allowed NSO customers, which include Saudi Arabia and Mexico, to hide code within images sent via iMessage that would allow Pegasus spyware to take over the phone.”
In the past few weeks (from the time of writing this article in November 2023), individuals – including political reporter Glen Owen for the Daily Mail – have received notifications from both the UK’s GCHQ and Apple, informing them that their phones have been attacked.
“These attackers are likely targeting you individually because of who you are or what you do,” the notification read, spelling out a sobering reality that our clients are all too familiar with. Apple’s latest security blow highlights how NSO continues to find weaknesses in evolving operating systems despite the financial issues it faces due to United States government sanctions.
Our competitors remain in the stone age of cyber security, learning from each major incident as it comes. This is not a risk we’ve ever been willing to take. Plugging holes as they appear is no longer effective. For mobile device security to survive in the brave new world, they must be built from the ground-up, with security at the forefront of design and production. Standard security features are ‘added-on’ by most device manufacturers, leaving vulnerabilities at each integral layer.
Applications are easily breached, the operating systems are insecure, and standard smartphone hardware doesn’t protect against malware threats on either endpoint devices. “There’s no silver bullet solution with cyber security, a layered defense is the only viable defense.” – James Scott, Senior Fellow, Institute for Critical Infrastructure Technology
The Sotera SecurePhone’s innovative multi-layer lockdown safeguards every aspect of the device, so it can never be infiltrated by sophisticated spyware like Pegasus. At the hardware level, foreign components are unrecognizable and powerless. As for software, our operating system, Integrity 178B, is rated by NSA as being the most secure available.
It provides time/space partitioning, access control, fault control and guaranteed resource allocation, and unsurprisingly has been selected for over 100 major safety and security systems.
To top it off, the Sotera SecurePhone comes installed with only 100% secure applications, offering end-to-end encryption with isolated and partitioned application threads, and security-enhanced Signal protocol-based voice/messenger.
That’s 100% security with the hardware, 100% security with software, and 100% security with the applications. It turns out three really is the magic number, but at Sotera we don’t believe in pulling the promise of privacy out of a hat. In fact, we think it’s important to explain exactly how we do what we do – so you know the Sotera SecurePhone will always keep on doing it.
