Senior EU officials were targeted via NSO Group’s famous spying software Pegasus as per the latest report from Reuters. As per the report minimum five individuals including European Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders have been targeted along with other two EU officials.
However, it is not known who is behind the usage of this surveillance software on the EU officials and what is the information they are looking into.
Pegasus Spyware, NSO and the privacy concern
The NSO group said in a statement shared the information with Reuters that they weren’t behind the hacking attempts, The spying incident was identified after Apple notified the victims of the state sponsored attacks last November as a measure to nullify Israeli spyware projects targeting its customers.
It is also to be noted that Apple also filed a lawsuit against NSO for court issued injunction for banning the company from using its products and services to create and deploy spyware attacks.
Pegasus is deployed using a zero-click attack vectors like FORCEDENTRY, grants its government and law enforcement customers complete access to target’s device, including their PII data.
The use of Pegasus has been quite prominent in recent times which led US government to add NSO Group into the trade block-list,in turn prompting Israel to restrict the number of countries to which the software is sold for reducing the offensive surveillance tools.
In February 2022, the EU Data Protection Supervisor announced a ban on the Pegasus software in the region, stating the tool has an unprecedented level of intrusiveness that could affect user privacy on a massive scale.
Investigating the EU officials Pegasus hack
After a forensic investigation released by the security defenders last week, it is found that the iPhone of Suhair Jaradat, a Jordanian journalist and human rights defender was hacked with Pegasus software using a malicious WhatsApp message in December 2021.
“A firm that truly respected such concerns would have at least paused operations for government clients, like Jordan, that have a widely publicized track record of human rights concerns and had enacted emergency powers giving authorities widespread latitude to infringe on civil liberties.” said the report.
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