Pegasus software: journalists, politicians and activists around the world spied on

Published on : 07/18/2021 – 10:10 PM

Human rights activists, journalists and opponents around the world have been spied on using software developed by an Israeli company, according to an investigation published Sunday (July 18) in several media.

The investigative consortium Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International were given access to a list, compiled in 2016, of 50,000 phone numbers that customers of NSO Group, creator of the Pegasus spyware, had selected for potential surveillance. It includes the numbers of at least 180 journalists, 600 politicians, 85 human rights activists, and 65 business leaders, according to an analysis carried out by 17 editorial staff.

Technical expertise

NSO Group spyware Pegasus, if inserted into a smartphone, can retrieve messages, photos, contacts, and even listen to calls from its owner.

Journalists from the investigative consortium met some of those targeted and recovered 67 phones, which were subject to technical expertise in an Amnesty International laboratory.

This review confirmed NSO Group spyware infection or attempted infection for 37 devices, according to the reports published on Sunday.

For the other 30, the results are not convincing, often because the owners of the numbers have changed phones.

“There is a strong temporal correlation between when the numbers appeared on the list and when they were placed under surveillance,” said the Washington Post.

Relatives of Jamal Khashoggi

Two of the phones belong to women close to Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, assassinated in 2018, in his country’s consulate in Istanbul by a commando of agents from Saudi Arabia.

This list includes the number of a Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda Birto, shot dead in Guerrero state, Mexico, a few weeks after it appeared on this document.

Foreign correspondents from several major media, including the Wall Street Journal, CNN, France 24, Mediapart, El País, or AFP are also part of it.

Other names of personalities on the list will be disclosed in the coming days by the media consortium that conducted the investigation, including Le Monde, The Guardian, and The Washington Post.

>> Read: Why Pegasus Is The Most Sophisticated Mobile Spyware Ever Detected

The company NSO Group, founded in 2011 and which has regularly been accused of playing into the game of authoritarian regimes, has always ensured that its software was only used to obtain information against criminal or terrorist networks.

But this investigation, which undermines the Israeli group, comes on top of a study, conducted in 2020, by the Citizen Lab of the University of Toronto, which had confirmed the presence of the Pegasus software in the phones of dozens of employees. of the Al-Jazeera channel in Qatar.

With AFP