Journalists and rights activists among Israeli firm’s spyware targets, investigation finds
- Israel-based NSO Group, an infamous hacker-for-hire outfit, is using military-grade malware to spy on journalists, activists and political dissidents
- The list includes journalists, politicians and government officials, business executives, human rights activists and several heads of state
An investigation by a global media consortium based on leaked targeting data provides further evidence that military-grade malware from Israel-based NSO Group, the world’s most infamous hacker-for-hire outfit, is being used to spy on journalists, human rights activists and political dissidents.
From a list of more than 50,000 mobile phone numbers obtained by the Paris-based journalism non-profit Forbidden Stories and the human rights group Amnesty International and shared with 16 news organisations, journalists were able to identify more than 1,000 individuals in 50 countries who were allegedly selected by NSO clients for potential surveillance.
They include 189 journalists, more than 600 politicians and government officials, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists and several heads of state, according to The Washington Post, a consortium member. The journalists work for organisations including Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde and The Financial Times.
Amnesty also reported that its forensic researchers had determined that NSO Group’s flagship Pegasus spyware was successfully installed on the phone of Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancée, Hatice Cengiz, just four days after he was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. The company had previously been implicated in other spying on Khashoggi.
NSO Group denied in an emailed statement that the data on which the report was based was leaked from its servers “since such data never existed on any of our servers”. It called the Forbidden Stories report “full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated theories”.