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A study of spyware used to swindle journalists, human rights activists, and officials

An intelligence tool licensed by the Israeli company NSO Group was used to target the calls of 37 journalists, human rights activists and other celebrities, according to a report released Sunday.

The report responded promptly from the NSO, which said it was “full of misconceptions and inconsistencies”.

Conducted by the non-profit journalism Banned News by 17 journalists, the survey conducted a list of more than 50,000 linked numbers of people allegedly selected to be reviewed by NSO clients since 2016, the group He said.

The banned sources said Pegasus, an NSO program that sells to government offices, was “misused” by clients to target lawyers, students and other professionals in countries including India, Mexico and France.

A criminal investigation by Amnesty International found that 37 phones were infected or had been tested by NSO spy software, according to a human rights group, which released reports on his ways.

The FT was unable to confirm on its own what the media consortium had said.

Defendants are said to also include Siddharth Varadarajan, founder of India’s The Wire pageant, and Szabolcs Panyi, a Hungarian journalist investigating the non-profit issue Direkt36, according to the Prohibited Report.

Bill Marczak, senior researcher at the Canadian management team Citizen Lab, said he had reviewed the four phones and confirmed with “great confidence” that they were tracking them with the Pegasus app. Marczak said the Citizen Lab also reviewed Amnesty’s methods and found it to be “normal”.

Participants in the agreement have promised to reveal the names of others in the group to be supervised in the coming days. The list included businessmen, cabinet ministers, presidents and prime ministers, according to The Guardian newspaper., one of the agreements.

An NSO spokesman said the company would “continue to investigate all alleged cases of misuse”, while denying what it says are “false” in a Forbidden Stories report.

“The NSO team has good reason to believe what has been said by the unnamed People in Prohibited Matters and confusing interpretations of information from available and illuminated information, such as HLR Lookup services, which are not related to Pegasus’s controversial customer list or any other NSO, says the prophet.

NSO they say The Pegasus program simply means taking the phones of people suspected of being involved in crime and crime. It also said that its customer alliance requires that things not be used to infringe on human rights, and has closed the client “many times in the past” for misuse.

The study also adds to the NSO’s analysis, which was priced at just over $ 1bn with its management team and the Novalpina independent company in 2019.

In December, Citizen Lab He said Many iPhones from Al Jazeera’s media were seized using NSO spy software. The NSO said the phenomenon was based on “speculation, misconceptions and lack of information”.

In the past, the Financial Times reports the attackers had used the threat in a WhatsApp messaging app to plant NSO spy software on a mobile phone. The NSO also stated that it did not operate or direct its expertise, which is only used by legal professionals.

Roula Khalaf, editor of FT, was one of more than 180 journalists named for NSO clients to take part in the study, the Guardian said. An NSO spokesman said it confirmed that Khalaf “was not a target of Pegasus and all NSO customers”.

“The freedom of the press is important, and the illegal interference of the government or the control of the media is unacceptable,” FT said.


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