Activists, journalists and politicians around the world have been spied on using cellphone malware developed by a private Israeli firm, reports said Sunday.
The use of the software, called Pegasus and developed by Israel’s NSO group, was reported on 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 up to 50,000 phone numbers believed to have been identified as people of interest by clients of NSO since 2016, the reports said. Not all of those numbers were subsequently hacked.
Among the numbers on the list are those of journalists from some of the world’s leading new agencies and publications.
Also on the list were two numbers belonging to women close to Saudi-born journalist Jamal Khashoggi, whom a Saudi hit squad murdered in the country’s embassy in Ankara in 2018.
The reports said many of the phone numbers were clustered in 10 countries — Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
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{Matzav.com}
