Telegram CEO’s Number Found on List of Potential NSO Spyware Targets

Pavel Durov, CEO and co-founder of chat platform Telegram, is the most recent individual to be swept up within the ongoing scandal involving the NSO Group.

The Guardian reports that Durov’s quantity was just lately recognized in a leaked checklist of some 50,000 cellphone data that researchers say symbolize “potential surveillance targets” of NSO’s Pegasus adware, implying that one of many firm’s prospects could have been spying on him.

That checklist was just lately shared with information shops by Amnesty International and the French non-profit Forbidden Stories and has served as the premise for a broad investigation into the Israeli surveillance agency’s enterprise practices. It has included the telephone numbers of presidents, former prime ministers, and a king, in addition to journalists, attorneys, and political activists. The final supply of the info has not been publicly disclosed.

So far, it’s unclear why Durov could be a goal for surveillance—and it’s unconfirmed that he’s. However, The Guardian reported that the businessman was added to the checklist not lengthy after he formally modified his residence from Finland to the United Arab Emirates—a reported NSO client. The outlet subsequently theorizes that it could have been a case of the UAE authorities “attempting to run checks on their controversial new resident.”

The query as as to whether Durov was positioned underneath surveillance raises some particularly thorny points, contemplating the truth that his firm prides itself on prioritizing privateness and safety. Telegram affords prospects the choice to encrypt their chats in addition to the promise of safety “from hacker attacks.”

When questioned by The Guardian about Durov, NSO appeared to sidestep the difficulty:

Asked instantly whether or not Durov’s telephone was a goal of Pegasus or some other exercise associated to the adware, an NSO spokesperson didn’t instantly reply the query. They stated: “Any claim that a name in the list is necessarily related to a Pegasus target or potential target is erroneous and false.”

NSO has continued to disavow the allegations towards it and introduced Wednesday that it will not be responding to requests for remark from the press.

“Enough is enough!” an organization spokesperson proclaimed. “In light of the recent planned and well-orchestrated media campaign lead by Forbidden Stories and pushed by special interest groups, and due to the complete disregard of the facts, NSO is announcing it will no longer be responding to media inquiries on this matter and it will not play along with the vicious and slanderous campaign.”

The firm additionally repeated that the checklist has nothing to do with NSO purchasers’ surveillance targets: “We will state again: The list is not a list of targets or potential targets of Pegasus.” In current days, the agency has additionally issued numerous rebuttals to the Washington Post for its protection of the obvious scandal.

However, NSO’s claims are at odds with investigative findings associated to the info cache. Amnesty International has forensically analyzed at the least 67 telephones whose numbers had been on the checklist, discovering digital traces of NSO’s adware on 37 of them (checks on the opposite 30 gadgets had been deemed inconclusive). This examine was subsequently peer-reviewed by Citizen Lab, an educational analysis unit with the University of Toronto that has additionally been deeply concerned with the venture.

Also contradicting the corporate’s narrative is the truth that, in a legal letter sent to Forbidden Stories, NSO apparently stated that it “does not have insight into the specific intelligence activities of its customers,” which would appear to preclude it from figuring out whether or not the numbers on the checklist are legit or not.

It’s true that some readability remains to be lacking surrounding the checklist. For occasion, it’s unclear the place the leaked knowledge got here from, and the last word nature of its total contents haven’t finally been confirmed. News shops have largely handled the info dump as a compilation of “persons of interest” for NSO purchasers—people who could have been at the least thought-about as targets for adware deployment, if not outright focused.