This studio photographic illustration shows a smartphone with the website of Israel's NSO Group which features Pegasus spyware, on display in Paris on July 21, 2021. Israel’s Cellebrite has been widely used by law enforcement, intelligence and private agencies in 150 different countries, while Candiru produced a spyware called “Sourgum” which is able to exploit vulnerabilities in Microsoft and Google products and is believed to have been used to monitor journalists and activists as well. In the US, the NSA has used a spyware programme called Dropout Jeep to hack into Apple iPhones. Government agencies have long used software to monitor the activities of persons of interest. Pegasus is not the first - or the only - such malware in existence, nor can we be sure that it is the most sophisticated. What makes the most recent scandal stand out are both the numbers of people involved and the revelation that this very sophisticated spyware has the ability to infect a phone with no action by the targeted person (known as “zero-click”), to give complete access and control of a phone to the attacker. In 2019, WhatsApp filed a lawsuit against NSO over Pegasus spyware which had been used to compromise the accounts of more than 1,400 journalists, human rights activists and dissidents around the world by exploiting the App’s zero-day vulnerability (software weaknesses that have not yet been found or fixed by manufacturers). They alerted Apple, which in turn quickly released an update to patch the vulnerabilities. In 2016, for example, the hacking of a UAE human rights defender was exposed by Citizen Lab and Lookout Security. References to it have surfaced in the past for being used by repressive governments to hack and spy on journalists and human rights activists. Pegasus is a spyware that can turn Android or iOS phones into surveillance devices. Many of which are uncorroborated theories that raise serious doubts about the reliability of your sources, as well as the basis of your story.” NSO stated: “NSO Group firmly denies false claims made in your report. What makes this scandal stand out are both the numbers of people involved and the revelation that this very sophisticated spyware has the ability to infect a phone with no action by the targeted person (known as “zero-click”) In response to the Guardian’s report on the Pegasus issue, however, it denied what it called “false claims”. Two years earlier, NSO had pledged to police abuses of its software, stating that it would “bring the company into alignment with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights”. The Guardian reported that not all numbers on the list had been confirmed to have been hacked, however.Īccording to The Washington Post, a phone belonging to the fiancee of its murdered Saudi columnist Jamal Khashoggi had also been infected by the Pegasus malware just days after he was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. According to a report by the Guardian, the list included numbers belonging to AFP, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the New York Times, Al Jazeera, France 24, Radio Free Europe, Mediapart, El País, the Associated Press, Le Monde, Bloomberg, The Economist, Reuters and Voice of America.Īlso on the list were some heads of state and prime ministers, members of Arab royal families, diplomats and politicians as well as activists and business executives. The scale of the surveillance operations had been leaked first to Amnesty International and Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based media non-profit organisation, which carried out a forensic investigation of the data and passed it on to the media groups.Īround 50,000 phone numbers belonging to journalists, political activists and political figures were found to be on a list of numbers believed to be “of interest” to clients of NSO. On July 18, a consortium of 17 media organisations calling itself the Pegasus Project revealed that specialist spyware known as “ Pegasus” - manufactured by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group - had been used to hack phones. Revelations in July that “repressive” governments around the world had been using Israeli-manufactured spyware to monitor the smartphones of journalists and activists have caused understandable alarm among members of the media. How to protect yourself following the news that sophisticated spyware has been used to hack the smartphones of journalists, activists and politicians around the world.
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