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According to an investigation released on Sunday, a spyware tool licensed by Israeli company NSO Group was used to target the smartphones of 37 journalists, human rights activists and other prominent figures.
The report got a quick response from the OSN, which claimed it was “full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories.”
The investigation was based on a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers linked to people who had allegedly been selected for possible surveillance of OSN customers since 2016, the investigation was conducted with Forbidden Stories, without for-profit, in journalism. dit.
Forbidden Stories said Pegasus, a software product that NSO sells to government agencies, had been “widely used” by clients to target lawyers, academics and other professionals from countries such as India, Mexico and France.
A forensic analysis by Amnesty International found that all 37 phones had been infected or faced attempts at infection by NSO spyware, according to the human rights group, which released a separate document report on its methodology.
The FT was unable to independently verify the claims reported by the media consortium.
Victims of the attacks are said to include Siddharth Varadarajan, founder of the Indian news site The Wire, and Szabolcs Panyi, a Hungarian-language investigative journalist for non-profit journalism Direkt36, according to Forbidden Stories.
Bill Marczak, a senior researcher at the Canadian surveillance group Citizen Lab, said he had reviewed four of the phones and confirmed with “great confidence” that they had been targets for Pegasus software. Marczak said Citizen Lab reviewed Amnesty’s methodology by parents and had found it “solid.”
Consortium partners have pledged to reveal the names of other people on the alleged watch list in the coming days. This list included business executives, cabinet ministers, presidents and prime ministers, according to The Guardian newspaper., one of the consortia.
An OSN spokesman said the company “would continue to investigate all credible allegations of misuse,” while denying what it claimed were “false allegations” in the banned stories report.
“The NSO group has good reason to believe that the claims of unnamed Forbidden Stories sources are based on a misleading interpretation of data from accessible and open basic information, such as HLR search services, which do not have no relation to the target customer list of Pegasus or any other NSO product, ”the spokesman said.
NSO has said Pegasus software is only intended to collect mobile data on people suspected of involvement in crime and terrorism. He said his agreement with the customer required that the products not be used to violate human rights and that he had shut down customers ’systems“ several times in the past ”due to misuse.
The investigation is in addition to NSO’s scrutiny, which its management team and private equity firm Novalpina valued at more than $ 1 billion in 2019.
In December, Citizen Lab dit Dozens of iPhones used by Al Jazeera journalists had been hacked using NSO spyware. NSO said the allegations were based on “speculation, inaccurate assumptions and without a complete mastery of the facts”.
Previously, the Financial Times reported that the attackers had used a vulnerability in the WhatsApp messaging app to plant NSO spyware on specific phones. NSO said at the time that it was not involved in the operation or targeting of its technology, which was only operated by intelligence agencies and police.
Roula Khalaf, the editor of the FT, was among more than 180 journalists who were potential targets of OSN clients in the investigation, The Guardian reported. The OSN spokesman said he had confirmed that Khalaf “was not a Pegasus target for any of the OSN customers.”
“Press freedoms are vital and any illegal state interference or surveillance of journalists is unacceptable,” an FT spokesman said.
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