Dozens of high-profile politicians and activists across Europe have been targeted for surveillance with the infamous Pegasus spyware, according to new research, with the reported victims including UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and a number of Catalan independence leaders in Spain.
Findings published on Monday by Toronto-based cyber research firm Citizen Lab indicate that the Israeli-developed Pegasus spyware program was used to illicitly surveil government institutions in the United Kingdom between 2020 and 2021, among them the prime minister’s office on 10 Downing Street and the the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCO).
“When we found the No. 10 case, my jaw dropped,” John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Citizen Lab, told the New Yorker in an interview, while another employee said the lab suspects the breach “included the exfiltration of data.”