Answering the question “Where are you from?” has never come easily for Lena Wolf. As the descendents of 18th-century German settlers living in Soviet Kazakhstan, she and her family “didn’t exist as a group” in the history books or on TV. As a result, many of their neighbors equated them with the soldiers from Nazi Germany who had invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 even though their ancestors had arrived in the Russian Empire more than a hundred years earlier.
Last week, on May 25, the digital-rights group Access Now broke a story revealing that Pegasus spyware was used to hack civil-society figures in Armenia. Notably, these infiltrations took place against the backdrop of the conflict with Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh making this investigation’s findings the first documented evidence of Pegasus spyware being used in the context of an international war.