More Polish opposition figures found to have been targeted by Pegasus spyware
Source: The Guardian
More Polish opposition figures found to have been targeted by Pegasus spyware
Analysis by Amnesty International linked them to Pegasus Project leak of more than 50,000 phone numbers
Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington
@skirchy
Thu 17 Feb 2022 05.00 GMT
The use of intrusive spyware by members of the European Union is expected to face new scrutiny following revelations that the mobile phones of two more Polish citizens with close links to an opposition senator were targeted by a client of NSO Group, according to security experts.
Forensic analysis by Amnesty International found that both Magdalena Łośko, the former assistant to Polish senator Krzysztof Brejza, and Brejza’s father, Ryszard Brejza, received text messages in 2019 that researchers said were technically consistent with spyware attacks by clients of NSO Group using Pegasus.
In both cases, the timing of the targeting matched the appearance of Łośko’s and Ryszard Brejza’s mobile phone numbers in a leaked database at the heart of the Pegasus Project, an investigation into NSO Group by a media consortium including the Guardian, Wyborcza and Die Zeit, coordinated by the French non-profit group Forbidden Stories.
The data leak is a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, since 2016, are believed to have been selected as people of interest by government clients of NSO Group. The consortium believes the data indicates the potential targets that NSO’s government clients identified in advance of possible surveillance. The presence of an individual’s phone number in the database does not mean the mobile phone was hacked. NSO has strongly denied that the data has any connection to the Israeli firm and said the phone numbers on the list are not targets of NSO customers.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/17/more-polish-opposition-figures-found-to-have-been-targeted-by-pegasus-spyware
