See how 17 news outlets are coming together to expose Pegasus spyware
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A version of this article first appeared in the “Reliable Sources” newsletter.
And the revelations are only just beginning.
The consortium began to publish its findings on Sunday. The stories indicate that numerous members of the media were “possible candidates for surveillance,” as The Guardian put it. Forensic tests affirmed the presence of spyware on some phones.
More will be coming out in the days ahead. The participating news outlets are dubbing this the “Pegasus Project,” teeing off the name of the spyware, Pegasus, which is ostensibly licensed by NSO Group to track terrorists and major criminals. How has the spyware been used? Has it been abused? Those are two of the key questions.
Spyware is sold to governments to fight terrorism In India, it was used to hack journalists and others
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Israeli spyware company NSO Group has said repeatedly that its surveillance tools do not work against smartphones based in the United States, but Americans traveling overseas and using foreign cellphones may not enjoy that protection.
A list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that included some for documented surveillance targets also included the overseas phone numbers for about a dozen Americans, including journalists, aid workers, diplomats and others, according to an investigation by The Washington Post and 16 other news organizations.
The investigation was unable to determine whether clients of NSO had delivered or attempted to deliver its Pegasus spyware to any of these numbers. But the presence of numbers used by American officials on the list highlighted questions about the national security threat posed by commercially available spyware.
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(CNN) Scores of journalists from 17 news outlets worked together to expose evidence of industrial-scale spying that targeted journalists, activists, politicians, and business executives.
And the revelations are only just beginning.
The consortium began to publish its findings on Sunday. The stories indicate that numerous members of the media were possible candidates for surveillance, as The Guardian put it. Forensic tests affirmed the presence of spyware on some phones.
More will be coming out in the days ahead. The participating news outlets are dubbing this the Pegasus Project, teeing off the name of the spyware, Pegasus, which is ostensibly licensed by NSO Group to track terrorists and major criminals. How has the spyware been used? Has it been abused? Those are two of the key questions.
U.S. Takes Down Israeli Spy Software Company
Published: July 19, 2021
A number of international papers report today on the Israeli hacking company NSO which sells snooping software to various regimes. The software is then used to hijack the phones of regime enemies, political competition or obnoxious journalists. All of that was already well known but the story has new legs as several hundreds of people who were spied on can now be named.
The phones appeared on a list of more than 50,000 numbers that are concentrated in countries known to engage in surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been clients of the Israeli firm, NSO Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely unregulated private spyware industry, the investigation found.
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