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Israeli spyware used to target journalists, activists

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/18/malware-targets-journalists-activists-and-lawyers-media-reports

Publisher:  Al Jazeera
Date Written:  18/07/2021
Year Published:  2021  
Resource Type:  Article

Activists, politicians and journalists from around the world – including from Al Jazeera – were targeted in a surveillance operation using software sold by the Israeli surveillance company NSO Group, according to an investigation into a massive data leak by The Guardian, The Washington Post and 15 other media outlets.

Abstract: 
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Excerpt:

Pegasus, a sophisticated surveillance tool developed by the Israel-based company, infects the user’s smartphone and steals all the phone’s information, including every contact name and phone number, text message, email, Facebook message, everything from Skype, WhatsApp, Viber, WeChat and Telegram.

“The scale is staggering compared with anything we have seen before,” Bill Marczak, a research fellow at cyberspace research group Citizen Lab, told Al Jazeera. He noted that a previous expose had uncovered the hacking of about 1,400 numbers.

The latest list did not identify the clients but the reports said many were clustered in 10 countries: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

“The surveillance industry works under a cloud of darkness – its products are designed to deceive and skirt culpability,” Natalia Krapiva, tech legal counsel at Access Now, told Al Jazeera.

“Yet we ask ourselves, ‘how could something like this happen?’ Spyware companies simply cannot be trusted to hold themselves accountable. This story, along with the recent revelations of abuses by Cellebrite and Candiru, is another example of why we urgently need to hold these surveillance companies and the governments that use them up to the light.

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