The Million Dollar Dissident: NSO Group's iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender - The Citizen Lab

Citizen Lab and Lookout describe a targeted attack against UAE human rights defender Ahmed Mansoor in 2016 that used a chain of iOS zero-days (Trident) to remotely jailbreak his iPhone and deploy Pegasus spyware, enabling covert data collection and surveillance. The researchers link the attack to NSO Group’s infrastructure, document the exploit chain with three CVEs, report on the data types exfiltrated, outline the attack’s discovery and responsible disclosure to Apple, and highlight policy implications for export controls and oversight of government spyware.