WASHINGTON: Indian Government-sponsored hackers tried to plant spyware made by NSO Group on the iPhone of a journalist working for the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project in August, the group’s co-founder said.
Analysis of the reporter’s phone showed an infiltration attempt on August 23rd, group co-founder Drew Sullivan said. The journalist, Anand Mangnale, was among many people in India who had received alerts from Apple firm last week warning them that they had been attacked by “state-backed” hackers attempting to access their iPhones.
According to Sullivan an internal forensic probe tied the intrusion attempt against Mangnale’s phone to Israeli firm NSO’s Pegasus hacking instrument. The spyware permits hackers sweeping access to the targets’ phones, permitting them to record phone calls, intercept messages and transform the phones into listening devices.
India Exposed: Journalists’ IPhones Planted Spyware
In a statement, Sullivan said that use of the instrument on Mangnale’s phone was “unacceptable and shameful,”.
“Whatever Indian government is spying on the journalists, there is no reasonable explanation for that other than political interest and gain,” Sullivan stated. OCCRP, a global forum of investigative journalists, is known for its far-reaching, document-based exposes of organized crime and corruption.
iVerify stated that it found a pattern of doubtful crashes on it that matched formerly known Pegasus intrusions. Apple’s recent alerts reached over 20 people in India, most of them opposition parties’ politicians, igniting a fresh storm of accusations that India is using hacking instruments against its own people just months before a national Indian election is scheduled to begin.
