Despite victims’ complaints, legal proceedings launched by two digital giants – Apple and WhatsApp – and revelations from the press or non-governmental organizations, the Pegasus spyware, marketed by the Israeli company NSO, and its government customers continue to target journalists and human rights defenders.
In a report published on April 5, the Irish NGO Front Line Defenders and the Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity laboratory of the Canadian University of Toronto, reveal that the phones of four Jordanian activists, lawyers and journalists were hacked by clients NSO government agencies between August 2019 and December 2021. According to the report, these attacks are likely the work of Jordanian intelligence agencies.
Among the four people targeted, Ahmed Al-Neimat, a human rights defender, is currently in prison. He was involved in the defense of the victims of the Al-Salt hospital scandal, where the lack of oxygen had caused the death of at least seven people in March 2021. Member of the National Forum for the Defense of Freedoms, the lawyer Malik Abu Orabi, who notably defends Mr. Al-Neimat, was hacked 21 times. The third victim, Suhair Jaradat, is a journalist and women’s rights activist. A fourth target, a journalist, wished to remain anonymous.
The Pegasus software is capable of infecting smartphones, in particular iPhones marketed by the Apple company, and of discreetly extracting all of the content therein, or even of serving as a remote listening system. by activating the microphone of the telephone without the knowledge of its owner.
Apple, prime target
The December 2021 hacks, which targeted an iPhone, came weeks after the US tech giant filed a lawsuit against the Israeli company. Apple accuses him of “gross violations of US law” and asks the American courts to prohibit NSO from using all its devices and services.
The complaint followed the identification by top spyware experts Citizen Lab of a vulnerability in Apple’s messaging app that allows Pegasus to enter devices. The American company subsequently warned dozens of victims of this flaw, after analyzing it.
“The fact that the targeting we uncovered took place after the widespread publicity around Apple’s lawsuit is noteworthy; a company that truly respected these concerns would have at least paused the operations of its government clients, such as Jordan, whose track record of human rights abuses has been widely documented,” note the editors of Front Line Defenders and Citizen Lab.
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