The Wire news website’s editor Siddharth Varadarajan and another journalist in India were targeted with Pegasus spyware this year, the nonprofit Amnesty International’s Security Lab was able to determine after testing their devices, it announced on Thursday. The journalists had received an alert from Apple that they were being targeted by “state-sponsored hacking,” following which they provided their phones to Amnesty for testing. NSO Group, the Pegasus spyware’s developer, only sells its technology to governments. India’s Intelligence Bureau imported hardware from NSO Group in 2017, trade data shows.
Separately, the Washington Post reported that after the security alerts went out in October, government officials put ‘pressure’ on Apple to offer ‘alternative’ explanations to the public on why these warnings were sent to Opposition leaders and journalists. Union Ministers and Apple had made a series of misleading and unsubstantiated statements when these alerts went out, such as that these messages had gone out in 150 countries, when no other countries’ citizens — or ruling party lawmakers — had reported receiving a warning that week.
The Pegasus spyware, which the Union government has not categorically denied buying or using, allows attackers to extract all the contents of smartphones by leveraging software weaknesses that are known to a select few hackers, and sold for millions of dollars. These so-called ‘zero day exploits’ allow attackers to access all the data on even phones whose software has been fully updated, and access real-time camera and microphone data. Such technology, privacy activists argue, is an unconstitutional form of surveillance. Dozens of Opposition leaders, journalists and activists were targeted by Pegasus until 2021, according to the Forbidden Stories collective, which reported on a leak of the spyware’s global targets.
