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Ex-Military Hacker: The Secret World Of Government Surveillance - Bill Thompson - #1131
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The Biggest Exploitation Hack
At 18:44 · chapter starts 17:05
When Chris asks for the gnarliest publicly known hacking exploits, Bill doesn't hesitate: Pegasus is the king [1] — Bill Thompson "Pegasus was a persistent phone implant that lived in a location no trained forensic operator would think to look. Even Bill Thompson — who …" 17:10 . In its earliest form, it required clicking a phishing link — but what made it extraordinary was where it lived on the phone once installed. It was stored in a location so counterintuitive that even a trained military forensic operator doing a full phone dump during a triage would have missed it. Bill wanted to run his own analysis on it but had left the military by the time it became prominent. He pivoted to another Israeli operation that drew equal admiration: the 2024 Hezbollah pager bombing. Years of target development, corporate espionage, supply chain interdiction, patience while waiting for the devices to be distributed — and then simultaneous detonation. 'I wish I'd have been part of something like that,' he says, before immediately recommending someone make a movie about it.
Pegasus was a persistent phone implant that lived in a location no trained forensic operator would think to look. Even Bill Thompson — who used to dump phones and scan them professionally — says he would have missed it during a standard triage.
The Pegasus spyware implant was stored in a location on the phone that even a trained forensics operator like Bill Thompson would not intuitively check during a triage dump.
