Human rights Activists, politicians, Journalists, and lawyers across the world were targeted in a surveillance operation using hacking software sold by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, according to a sweeping investigation by the Washington Post, the guardian, and 15 other media organizations.
The sweeping investigation by the media organizations suggests widespread and continuing abuse of NSO’s hacking spyware, Pegasus, which the company insists is only intended for use against criminals and terrorists.
Pegasus is a malware that infects iPhones and Android devices to enable operators of the tool to extract messages, photos, and emails, record calls, and secretly activate microphones.
The reports released on Sunday said “authoritarian governments” abused the Pegasus software, “hacking 37 smartphones,” according to a report by the Washington Post.
The investigation discovered that the hacked phones were on a list of more than 50,000 numbers based in countries known to surveil people, according to a report by the Guardian.
The list of numbers were shared with media partners as part of the Pegasus project, a reporting consortium, by a Paris-based nonprofit journalism organization Forbidden Stories and human rights group Amnesty International.
The Pegasus Project is a collaboration by more than 80 journalists from 17 media organizations in 10 countries coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based media non-profit, with the technical support of Amnesty International, who conducted cutting- edge forensic tests on mobile phones to identify traces of the spyware.
The NSO Group rejected the conclusions of the investigation. “Your sources have supplied you with information that has no factual basis, as evidenced by the lack of supporting documentation for many of the claims,” it claimed.
In a statement, The NSO Group said “the report by Forbidden Stories is full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories that raise serious doubts about the reliability and interests of the sources. It seems like the “unidentified sources” have supplied information that has no factual basis and are far from reality.”
“After checking their claims, we firmly deny the false allegations made in their report. Their sources have supplied them with information which has no factual basis, as evident by the lack of supporting documentation for many of their claims,” NSO said in a statement.
NSO also warned that these allegations are so outrageous and far from reality, that NSO is considering a defamation lawsuit.
“The media partners will be revealing the identities of people whose number appeared on the list in the coming days,” the Guardian wrote. “They include hundreds of business executives, religious figures, academics, NGO employees, union officials and government officials, including cabinet ministers, presidents and prime ministers”.
The disclosures begin on Sunday, with the revelation that the numbers of more than 180 journalists are listed in the data, including reporters, editors, and executives at the Financial Times, CNN, the New York Times, France 24, The Economist, Associated Press, and Reuters.
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Source: The Washington Post, The Guardian, Forbidden Stories, Amnesty International
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