I suspect Israel has backdoor access to most CPUs.
Here is how Pegasus seems:
- China has 1.5 billion people, lots of resources, would profit a lot economically if they found a way to hack iOS, etc. But yet couldn't hack it.
- Israel with its 7 million people, not only hacks iOS multiple times, but does it to spy on its allies.
Now I've seen the threads analysing Pegasus' complexity, I don't know if it's been reproduced, and if it has then I guess it logically proves me wrong (the tinfoil hatter in me still thinks its right though).
Here is why:
Israel has a lot of silicon fabs or R&D centers, now it makes ZERO sense for the US to have fabs or R&D centers in Israel, since that country is (allegedly) always at the risk of being bomber for no reason at all (yeah right).
Intel has had fabs in Israek since the 80s, why not in Japan or France or the UK (France and the UK are close allies to the US and have no earthquakes or risk of being bombed), why not even Canada?
And I compared the dates of when intel started putting the Intel Management Engine in all of their CPU and the date of which they built their biggest fab in Israel, then I went down the rabbit hole of when AMD started using PSP (similar tech to Intel ME), and it coinciding with it buying a large pentesting startup in Israel, then starting to build its R&D centers there, Apple and Qualcomm have similar stories.
Obviously this is all tinfoil, and while the dates coincide it's obviously not enough.
But to each their own, and I choose to treat my tech as if it was all was backdoored already, because for me the evidence (while not enough to be sure) is enough for how much I value my privacy.