Apple mobile devices of at least 12 journalists and human rights activists from Armenia were hacked using spyware Pegasus. This is stated in a joint investigation by the international non-profit organization Access Now, the Armenian IT group CyberHUB-AM, the Citizen Lab research center of the University of Toronto, the security laboratory of the human rights organization Amnesty International and independent mobile security researcher Ruben Muradyan.
Device hacks have been documented between October 2020 and December 2022. Access Now, a global digital civil rights organization, told Meduza that circumstantial evidence suggests that the hacks may be related to the military conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in Nagorno-Karabakh. This is the first documented evidence of the use of Pegasus spyware in the context of a global war, the investigation claims.
The seven victims of the hacks have publicly named their names. This:
- Anna Naghdalyan is a former press secretary of the Armenian Foreign Ministry. Now he works in an NGO whose name is not disclosed so as not to draw attention to it;
- Karlen Aslanyan – journalist for the Armenian service of Radio Liberty;
- Astghik Bedevyan – journalist of the Armenian service of Radio Liberty;
- Ruben Melikyan – lawyer, human rights activist of the non-governmental organization “The Way of Law”, former Commissioner for Human Rights in Nagorno-Karabakh;
- Varuzhan Geghamyan – political scientist-turkologist, professor at Yerevan State University;
- Samvel Farmanyan – co-founder of the ArmNews TV channel, closed in February 2022;
- Kristinne Grigoryan is a former Human Rights Ombudsman of Armenia who resigned in early 2023.
The five others, whose Apple devices were also infected with Pegasus, wished to remain anonymous for personal and professional reasons. Among them are two journalists, an activist, a representative of the Armenian civil society, as well as a UN representative who did not receive the consent of the employer to speak in the public field.
In addition, many other representatives of Armenian civil society, such as Public Television journalist Vitaly Grigoryan, received notifications from Apple that their devices may be infected with spyware. However, the authors of the investigation have not yet fully confirmed this due to the lack of access to data on their devices.
In 2021, Apple said it had patched a vulnerability that allowed devices to be hacked using the Pegasus spyware. The virus penetrated devices via iMessage and did not require any action from the user to work. The corporation also filed a lawsuit against the Israeli NSO Group, which developed Pegasus. Apple has accused the NSO of using its software to spy on users.
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2023-05-25 10:08:00
