An international journalist consortium has published new allegations against the Israeli surveillance software provider NSO Group. IT experts found traces of attacks with the company’s Pegasus software on 37 smartphones belonging to journalists, human rights activists, their families and business people.
The numbers are part of a data set of more than 50,000 telephone numbers that the journalists share with the organizations Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International evaluate. According to the reports, the numbers were apparently selected by NSO customers as potential spying targets. NSO vehemently denied the allegations on Sunday.
They are also in the journalists’ consortium Southgerman newspaper, NDR, WDR and the time involved. According to their presentation, the research of the “Pegasus Project” suggests that Hundreds of journalists, human rights activists, opposition activists and politicians selected to monitor them with the spy software.
The numbers of more than 180 journalists from different countries are on the list. Numbers of German journalists are not among them. How the list came to Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International, which they then shared with the media, remained open in the reports – the Süddeutsche Zeitung referred to the source protection.
Allegations against NSO are increasing
NSO Group had previously been accused of using Pegasus software to help totalitarian governments spy on journalists and dissidents. Facebook sued NSO in the US in 2019. The allegation in the lawsuit is that NSO tried to gain access to hundreds of smartphones via a security hole in WhatsApp that was closed later. Among the target persons were journalists, lawyers, dissidents, human rights activists, diplomats and government officials.
NSO had also been accused of having played a role in the assassination of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi. According to the Washington Post belonged to two of the smartphones on which Amnesty International IT experts found traces of Pegasus attacks, Women close to Khashoggi.
NSO vehemently denies this
The Israeli company spoke on Sunday with a view to the Forbidden Stories report of “false allegations and misleading allegations”. Their sources provided them with information that had no factual basis. “The allegations are so outrageous and far from reality that NSO is considering filing a defamation lawsuit.”
NSO affirmed that its technology was “in no way related to the heinous murder of Jamal Khashoggi”. Its technology is “only sold to law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies of audited governments with the sole aim of saving lives by preventing crime and acts of terrorism.”
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