In 2022, state-sponsored attacks like NSO Group’s Pegasus will start to leak into the criminal hacker community, according to Watchguard.
When state-sponsored smartphone hacking are discovered, what happens? Of course, they’re reverse-engineered and end up in the cybercrime underground.
There is no ‘safe’ back door
There is no safe back door into smartphone security, which is an inconvenient truth. Authoritarian regimes may force smartphone platform developers to produce them, but this puts everyone at risk because those exploits will be discovered and exploited by criminals — who are just as brilliant as government developers and (sometimes) the same people.
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It’s not like Harry Potter’s favorite railway platform when it comes to smartphone security. There is no secret Platform 9.75 accessible only to government-approved hackers. If there is a door, it will be discovered. It is going to be duplicated. It will be exploited.
Experts predict that state-sponsored attacks will seep into the hacker underground in 2022, resulting in a firestorm of security issues across all platforms.
WatchGuard says watch out
The risk of state-sponsored attacks like those used by Israel’s NSO Group escaping into wider abuse is at the top of WatchGuard‘s 2022 cybersecurity predictions.
We know that most platform vendors are on the lookout for such attacks. According to Apple’s recent vow to “fight relentlessly to protect our users from abusive state-sponsored actors like NSO Group,” it most certainly is.
State-sponsored hacks, on the other hand, have unrestricted finances and access to resources that platform developers do not have. Originally, these designer exploits were created to strike key targets.
