MADRID (Dispatches) – A new investigation by CitizenLab has found that the Catalan president, Pere Aragones, was hacked by the Zionist regime’s NSO Group’s Pegasus software in one of Europe’s most significant phone-hacking cases.
The report by Citizen Lab, a research group that focuses on high-tech human rights abuses, said they found that at least 65 pro-Catalan independence individuals were targeted by the regime’s software, including all Catalan presidents since 2010, when some were still in office.
Four others were infected with a similar phone hacking software called Candiru, another secretive company based in the occupied territories that sells spyware to governments.
The hacking, Citizen Lab found, happened during “political negotiations and debates” over Catalonian independence.
The Pegasus software, developed by the regime’s NSO Group, allows governments to access the phones or laptops of activists and journalists worldwide, allowing operators to view messages, contacts, the camera, microphone, and location history.
Gonzalo Boye, a lawyer who has represented numerous Catalan political figures, including former presidents Carles Puigdemont and Quim Torra, was targeted 18 times with Pegasus infection attempts between January and May 2020.
Some of the attempts carried out via SMS were messages disguised as tweets from organizations like Human Rights Watch, The Guardian, Columbia Journalism Review, and Politico.
Citizens Lab has collected “more than 200 such messages” that involved operators sending text messages containing malicious links, which, once clicked on, would infect the device through a Pegasus exploit server.