by Kenny Stancil at the Defender
NSO Group, a private Israeli firm that sells surveillance technology to governments worldwide, insists that its Pegasus spyware is used only to “investigate terrorism and crime.” Leaked data, however, reveals that the company’s hacking tool “has been used to facilitate human rights violations around the world on a massive scale.”
That’s according to an investigative report published Sunday by the Pegasus Project, a media consortium of more than 80 journalists from 17 news outlets in 10 countries. The collaborative endeavor was coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based media nonprofit, with technical assistance from Amnesty International, which conducted “cutting-edge forensic tests” on smartphones to identify traces of the military-grade spyware.
The Guardian, one of the newspapers involved in the analysis, reported that “Pegasus is a malware that infects iPhones and Android devices to enable operators of the tool to extract messages, photos and emails, record calls and secretly activate microphones.” The Washington Post, another partner in the investigation, noted that the tool “can infect phones without a click.”
A massive data leak turned up a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, according to the Post, “are concentrated in countries known to engage in surveillance of their citizens and also known to have been clients of … NSO Group, a worldwide leader in the growing and largely unregulated private spyware industry.”…
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