WhatsApp says journalists and civil society members were targets of Israeli spyware

Nearly 100 journalists and other members of civil society using Meta’s chat service WhatsApp are suspected to have been targets of a spyware campaign conducted by an Israeli spyware company called Paragon Solutions, the company has said.

A WhatsApp spokesperson told NBC News on Friday that the attack targeted a number of users including journalists and members of civil society “across over two dozen countries, particularly in Europe.”

They added that Paragon Solutions used a method to illegally access a network to target the users and that “the vector involved using groups and sending a malicious PDF file.”

The spokesperson claimed that the company has “successfully disrupted this exploitation vector.”

Paragon’s hacking software is used by government clients and WhatsApp claimed it had not been able to identify the clients who ordered the alleged attacks.

Experts said the targeting was a “zero-click” attack, which means targets would not have had to click on any malicious links to be infected.

WhatsApp did not disclose where the journalists and members of civil society were based.

Following the series of attempted attacks, WhatsApp sent Paragon Solutions a cease-and-desist letter.

The spokesperson said that those believed to be affected have been notified through WhatsApp chat.

“These attackers look for vulnerabilities in apps or the mobile phone operating system or try to trick users into clicking on malicious links or downloading malware — all to gain unauthorized access that can damage your phone, steal your information and put your privacy and security at risk,” a WhatsApp help page on spyware reads.

Wired magazine in October reported that it had entered into a $2 million contract with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s homeland security investigations division.

John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, told NBC News that a hack such as this one has the ability to “turn a telephone into a spy in your pocket.”

“When a phone is infected, the operator of that spyware can typically do anything that you as a user can do on the phone,” Scott-Railton said.

“They can access your encrypted messages, your chats, look at your photographs, browse your messages, listen to your voice memos, look at your notes, read your contacts, get your passwords, and also do some number of things that you can’t do, like silently activating the microphone to listen to a conversation you might be having in a room, or turning on the camera.”

WhatsApp worked with Citizen Lab in 2019 when the chat service sued the Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group, accusing it of aiding government spies to hack the phones of over a thousand users, including journalists, diplomats, senior government officials and political dissidents.

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