The plight of women’s rights campaigners in Bahrain and Jordan is in the spotlight after new revelations that two prominent female activists were hacked multiple times by countries using NSO Group spyware.
An investigation by the human rights group Front Line Defenders (FLD) and the digital rights non-profit group Access Now found that the mobile phones of Ebtisam al-Saegh, a Bahraini human rights defender, and Hala Ahed Deeb, who works with human rights and feminist groups in Jordan, had been hacked using NSO’s Pegasus spyware.
Both women said the discoveries, which were confirmed by security researchers at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, felt like life-changing violations of their privacy, underscoring how such attacks against women were “particularly grievous” given how sensitive information could be weaponised against them.
“Since they discovered their phones were infected, they have each been living in a state of daily anxiety and fear. They are especially afraid of the possibility of exposing other female activists and victims they work with, and concerned that their families and friends are now at risk,” FLD and Access Now said.
According to Citizen Lab’s analysis, al-Saegh’s mobile device was found to have been hacked at least eight times between August and November 2019 using NSO spyware. It followed various incidents in which al-Saegh, who works for Salam for Democracy and Human Rights, was harassed by Bahraini authorities, including being summoned to a Muharraq police station, being interrogated, physically and sexually assaulted, and threatened with rape if she did not stop her activism, FLD and Access Now said.
What is in the data leak?
The data leak is a list of more than 50,000 phone numbers that, since 2016, are believed to have been selected as those of people of interest by government clients of NSO Group, which sells surveillance software. The data also contains the time and date that numbers were selected, or entered on to a system. Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based nonprofit journalism organisation, and Amnesty International initially had access to the list and shared access with 16 media organisations including the Guardian. More than 80 journalists have worked together over several months as part of the Pegasus project. Amnesty’s Security Lab, a technical partner on the project, did the forensic analyses.
What does the leak indicate?
The consortium believes the data indicates the potential targets NSO’s government clients identified in advance of possible surveillance. While the data is an indication of intent, the presence of a number in the data does not reveal whether there was an attempt to infect the phone with spyware such as Pegasus, the company’s signature surveillance tool, or whether any attempt succeeded. The presence in the data of a very small number of landlines and US numbers, which NSO says are “technically impossible” to access with its tools, reveals some targets were selected by NSO clients even though they could not be infected with Pegasus. However, forensic examinations of a small sample of mobile phones with numbers on the list found tight correlations between the time and date of a number in the data and the start of Pegasus activity – in some cases as little as a few seconds.
What did forensic analysis reveal?
Amnesty examined 67 smartphones where attacks were suspected. Of those, 23 were successfully infected and 14 showed signs of attempted penetration. For the remaining 30, the tests were inconclusive, in several cases because the handsets had been replaced. Fifteen of the phones were Android devices, none of which showed evidence of successful infection. However, unlike iPhones, phones that use Android do not log the kinds of information required for Amnesty’s detective work. Three Android phones showed signs of targeting, such as Pegasus-linked SMS messages.
Amnesty shared “backup copies” of four iPhones with Citizen Lab, a research group at the University of Toronto that specialises in studying Pegasus, which confirmed that they showed signs of Pegasus infection. Citizen Lab also conducted a peer review of Amnesty’s forensic methods, and found them to be sound.
Which NSO clients were selecting numbers?
While the data is organised into clusters, indicative of individual NSO clients, it does not say which NSO client was responsible for selecting any given number. NSO claims to sell its tools to 60 clients in 40 countries, but refuses to identify them. By closely examining the pattern of targeting by individual clients in the leaked data, media partners were able to identify 10 governments believed to be responsible for selecting the targets: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Hungary, India, and the United Arab Emirates. Citizen Lab has also found evidence of all 10 being clients of NSO.
What does NSO Group say?
You can read NSO Group’s full statement here. The company has always said it does not have access to the data of its customers’ targets. Through its lawyers, NSO said the consortium had made “incorrect assumptions” about which clients use the company’s technology. It said the 50,000 number was “exaggerated” and that the list could not be a list of numbers “targeted by governments using Pegasus”. The lawyers said NSO had reason to believe the list accessed by the consortium “is not a list of numbers targeted by governments using Pegasus, but instead, may be part of a larger list of numbers that might have been used by NSO Group customers for other purposes”. They said it was a list of numbers that anyone could search on an open source system. After further questions, the lawyers said the consortium was basing its findings “on misleading interpretation of leaked data from accessible and overt basic information, such as HLR Lookup services, which have no bearing on the list of the customers' targets of Pegasus or any other NSO products ... we still do not see any correlation of these lists to anything related to use of NSO Group technologies”. Following publication, they explained that they considered a "target" to be a phone that was the subject of a successful or attempted (but failed) infection by Pegasus, and reiterated that the list of 50,000 phones was too large for it to represent "targets" of Pegasus. They said that the fact that a number appeared on the list was in no way indicative of whether it had been selected for surveillance using Pegasus.
What is HLR lookup data?
The term HLR, or home location register, refers to a database that is essential to operating mobile phone networks. Such registers keep records on the networks of phone users and their general locations, along with other identifying information that is used routinely in routing calls and texts. Telecoms and surveillance experts say HLR data can sometimes be used in the early phase of a surveillance attempt, when identifying whether it is possible to connect to a phone. The consortium understands NSO clients have the capability through an interface on the Pegasus system to conduct HLR lookup inquiries. It is unclear whether Pegasus operators are required to conduct HRL lookup inquiries via its interface to use its software; an NSO source stressed its clients may have different reasons – unrelated to Pegasus – for conducting HLR lookups via an NSO system.
Al-Saegh said the knowledge that she had been hacked put her in a state of “daily fear and terror” and had taken away a sense of security she had felt within her own home, because she now felt her phone was “spying” on her at all times.
“Home used to be the only safe space for me, a place for personal freedom where I can take off the veil and exercise my religious and social freedoms without limits,” she said in a statement shared by FLD. “The fear has restricted my work. I am constantly anxious and afraid that I have put others at risk because of their contact with me.”
When it is successfully deployed against a mobile phone, Pegasus can intercept a mobile user’s messages and photographs, track their location and turn the phone into a remote listening device.
NSO has said that its software is licensed to be used by client countries against suspected terrorists and other serious criminals, and that it investigates credible allegations of abuse by its clients.
A spokesperson for NSO said: “We cannot directly comment on a report we haven’t seen, nor investigate based on names received in a press inquiry.”
The spokesperson added: “NSO’s firm stance on these issues is that the use of cyber tools in order to monitor dissidents, activists and journalists, regardless of their gender, is a severe misuse of any technology and goes against the desired use of such critical tools. The international community should have zero tolerance policy towards such acts, therefore a global regulation is needed. NSO has proven in the past it has zero tolerance for these types of misuse, by terminating multiple contracts.”
The discovery of spyware on the two activists’ phones follows multiple reports of other female activists and journalists who have been targeted in the past, including the late Emirati activist Alaa Al-Siddiq, and the Al Jazeera broadcast journalist Ghada Oueiss.
Researchers confirmed that Deeb’s mobile device was infected with Pegasus in March 2021. Deeb said the hacking had made her feel “violated, naked, and with no dignity”.
“I have often said that I have nothing to hide, but I realised that privacy in itself is my right,” she said in a statement that was shared by FLD.
She added: “I do not communicate with my friends and I avoid talking on the phone as much as I can. I practise a kind of self-censorship sometimes when I wonder what behaviours would provoke those who hacked my phone?”
