All the politicians, journalists and members of Royal Family living across the world were put on a high mobile security alert by a post from ‘The Guardian’ last week. And the post says that some hacktivists have somehow planted a spying malware on their phones respectively and are constantly spying on the targeted mobile activists.
Pegasus is the spying malware that is in discussion and has reportedly developed by Israel’s NSO Group that usually supplies such kind of software to governments across the world that indulge in mass surveillance programs.
Some news outlets like Le Monde and the Washington Post have also added in their news posts that so far over 50,000 phone numbers are believed to have been targeted by the hackers since 2016 and that includes the contact number of Hanan Eltar, the widow of Saudi Born Journalists Jamal Khashoggi who was killed in 2018 for reasons.
A source from the Washington Post added fuel to the story by saying that more details about the hack will be released by the end of next (August) month and confirmed that the hackers had access to the devices for years.
In the Media department, the organizations that were targeted include France Presse Agence, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, France 24, Radio Free Europe, Mediapart, El Pais, The Associated Press, Le Monde, Bloomberg, The Economists, Reuters and the Guardian.
Among politicians, mobile phones of heads of states, prime Ministers, members of Arab Royal family, UK’s Royal Family, diplomats and renowned business executives were targeted by the Pegasus malware.
Senior level staff from Amnesty International, Forbidden Stories from Paris, and other companies that were operating in over 11 countries such as Azerbaijan, Turkey, Bahrain, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, Togo, and UAE were also targeted by NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware.
More details will be released shortly!
Note- The said malware could target users using Android or Apple iPhones and could spread through messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Telegram.
