50,000 phone numbers worldwide on list linked to Israeli spyware
An Israeli firm accused of supplying spyware to governments
has been linked to a list of 50,000 smartphone numbers, including those of
activists, journalists, business executives and politicians around the world,
according to reports Sunday.
Israel's NSO Group and its Pegasus malware has been in the
headlines since at least 2016 when researchers accused it of helping spy on a
dissident in the United Arab Emirates.
Sunday's revelations raise privacy and rights concerns and
reveal the far-reaching extent to which the private Israeli company's software
may be being used by its clients internationally.
The extent of the use of Pegasus was reported by The
Washington Post, the Guardian, Le Monde and other news outlets who collaborated
on an investigation into a data leak.
The leak was of a list of more than 50,000 smartphone
numbers believed to have been identified as people of interest by clients of
NSO since 2016, the media outlets said.
The Post said the list was shared with the news
organizations by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based journalism nonprofit, and
Amnesty International. The newspaper said the total number of phones on the
list that were actually targeted or surveilled is unknown.
The Post said 15,000 of the numbers on the list were in
Mexico and included those of politicians, union representatives, journalists
and government critics.
The list reportedly included the number of a Mexican
freelance journalist who was murdered at a carwash. His phone was never found
and it was not clear if it had been hacked.
Indian investigative news website The Wire reported that 300
mobile phone numbers used in India -- including those of government ministers,
opposition politicians, journalists, scientists and rights activists -- were on
the list.
The numbers included those of more than 40 Indian
journalists from major publications such as the Hindustan Times, The Hindu and
the Indian Express as well as two founding editors of The Wire, it said.
The Indian government denied in 2019 that it had used the
malware to spy on its citizens after WhatsApp filed a lawsuit in the United
States against NSO, accusing it of using the messaging platform to conduct
cyber espionage.
The Post said a forensic analysis of 37 of the smartphones
on the list showed there had been "attempted and successful" hacks of
the devices, including those of two women close to Saudi journalist Jamal
Khashoggi, who was murdered in 2018 by a Saudi hit squad.
Among the numbers on the list are those of journalists for
Agence France-Presse, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The New York Times, Al
Jazeera, France 24, Radio Free Europe, Mediapart, El Pais, the Associated
Press, Le Monde, Bloomberg, the Economist, Reuters and Voice of America, the
Guardian said.
The use of the Pegasus software to hack the phones of
Al-Jazeera reporters and a Moroccan journalist has been reported previously by
Citizen Lab, a research center at the University of Toronto, and Amnesty
International.
- Pocket spy -
The Post said the numbers on the list are unattributed but
the media outlets participating in the project were able to identify more than
1,000 people in more than 50 countries.
They included several members of Arab royal families, at
least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and
more than 600 politicians and government officials including heads of state and
prime ministers and cabinet ministers.
The reports said many numbers on the list were clustered in
10 countries -- Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico,
Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Pegasus is reportedly a highly invasive tool that can switch
on a target's phone camera and microphone as well as access data on the device,
effectively turning a phone into a pocket spy.
In some cases it can be installed without the need to trick
a user into initiating a download.
NSO issued a denial on Sunday that focused on the report by
Forbidden Stories, calling it "full of wrong assumptions and uncorroborated
theories," and threatened a defamation lawsuit.
"We firmly deny the false allegations made in their
report," NSO said.
"As NSO has previously stated, our technology was not
associated in any way with the heinous murder of Jamal Khashoggi," the company
said.
"We would like to emphasize that NSO sells it
technologies solely to law enforcement and intelligence agencies of vetted
governments for the sole purpose of saving lives through preventing crime and
terror acts," it said.
Citizen Lab reported in December that about three dozen
journalists at Qatar's Al-Jazeera network had their mobile devices targeted by
Pegasus malware.
Amnesty International reported in June of last year that
Moroccan authorities used NSO's Pegasus software to insert spyware onto the
cellphone of Omar Radi, a journalist convicted over a social media post.
At the time, NSO told AFP that it was "deeply troubled
by the allegations" and was reviewing the information.
Founded in 2010 by Israelis Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie, NSO
Group is based in the Israeli hi-tech hub of Herzliya, near Tel Aviv. It says
it employs hundreds of people in Israel and around the world.
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