Spyware sold by the Israeli company NSO Group was used to hack an iPhone belonging to the chief executive officer of leading Russian independent media organisation Meduza, according to security researchers.<\/p>\n
Galina Timchenko, a Russian journalist and co-founder of Meduza, discovered in June that her phone had been compromised after receiving an alert from Apple Inc. that said state-sponsored attackers may have been targeting her.<\/p>\n
Digital rights researchers at Access Now<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0Citizen Lab<\/a><\/strong> analysed her device and confirmed it had been infected with NSO Group\u2019s \u201cPegasus\u201d spyware, the researchers said Wednesday.<\/p>\n NSO sells its spyware to government and law enforcement agencies, who use it to covertly break into mobile phones and remotely eavesdrop on calls and record messages.<\/p>\n The hack is the first documented case of Pegasus being used to target a Russian journalist, according to Access Now. But it isn\u2019t clear who was responsible.<\/p>\n NSO has sold its hacking technology to numerous government agencies in countries worldwide, according to the researchers.<\/p>\n A spokesperson for NSO Group said in a statement that it \u201conly sells its technologies to allies of the US and Israel and always investigates credible allegations of misuse, taking prompt action if warranted.\u201d<\/p>\n Timchenko\u2019s phone was hacked in February, the researchers found, two weeks after the Russian prosecutor general\u2019s office designated Meduza as an illegal organisation because it posed \u201ca threat to the foundations\u201d of Russia\u2019s constitutional order and security, according to the Russian news agency Interfax<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n At the time her phone was infected with the spyware, Timchenko, who lives in Latvia, was in Berlin, attending a meeting with other exiled members of Russian independent media, according to Access Now\u2019s report.<\/p>\n The spyware exploited what\u2019s known as a \u201czero click<\/a><\/strong>\u201d vulnerability \u2014 meaning Timchenko\u2019s phone was compromised silently without her clicking a malicious link or performing any other action.<\/p>\n Ivan Kolpakov, Meduza\u2019s editor-in-chief, said in an interview on Wednesday that whoever was responsible for carrying out the hack, his organisation had been left disturbed by the incident.<\/p>\n \u201cWe escaped Russia because we didn\u2019t want to deal with this kind of behaviour\u201d from secret services, he said. \u201cWe started Meduza in 2014 in Latvia because this is exactly the type of risk we wanted to avoid. It means we are not safe even in Europe.\u201d<\/p>\n NSO Group has previously said that its technology is intended to be used to investigate serious criminals.<\/p>\n But the company has been persistently accused by rights groups and media organisations of selling its technology to governments who have used it to target political opponents, activists and journalists.<\/p>\n In November 2021, the US Commerce Department\u00a0blacklisted<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0the company, accusing it of enabling \u201ctransnational repression.\u201d<\/p>\n NSO sells its spyware to government and law enforcement agencies, who use it to covertly break into mobile phones and remotely eavesdrop on calls and record messages.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":341034,"featured_media":411500,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_sma_x_autopost_status":"idle","_sma_x_autopost_error":"","_sma_x_post_id":"","_sma_facebook_post_id":"","_sma_instagram_post_id":"","_sma_threads_post_id":"","_sma_x_attempts":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[89360,89358,54297,59020,15533,18564],"class_list":["post-507944","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-security","tag-galina-timchenko","tag-meduza","tag-nso-group","tag-pegasus-spyware","tag-russia","tag-spyware"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507944"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/341034"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=507944"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507944\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/411500"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=507944"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=507944"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=507944"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Now read: Best security products to protect cloud services<\/a><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"