Pegasus
The Citizen Lab has sent an open letter to Francisco Partners in light of the apparent misuse of NSO Group’s technology– a company in which we believe Francisco Partners has a majority stake– and to request timely action in regards to issues raised in previous correspondence.
Citizen Lab senior research fellow Bill Marczak and Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz joined CNN to discuss how NSO’s Pegasus spyware found on Omar’s phone is linked to Jamal Khashoggi.
Following a Citizen Lab report that identified the presence of NSO’s Pegasus spyware technology in Quebec, researchers contacted Omar Abdulaziz, a Saudi Arabian dissident and Canadian permanent resident who has long been critical of the regime in Riyadh. After an extensive investigation, they discovered that his phone had been targeted with this powerful spyware and the operators of the technology were linked to Saudi Arabia’s government and security services.
In this report, we describe how Canadian permanent resident and Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz was targeted with a fake package delivery notification. We assess with high confidence that Abdulaziz’s phone was infected with NSO’s Pegasus spyware. We attribute this infection to a Pegasus operator linked to Saudi Arabia.
In this post, we develop new Internet scanning techniques to identify 45 countries in which operators of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware may be conducting operations.
This letter requests a follow up to correspondence Citizen Lab sent to Francisco Partners in February after we discovered the apparent use of the products of its portfolio company, Sandvine, to surreptitiously inject malicious and dubious redirects for users in Turkey, Syria, and Egypt.
The purchase of a $400 million stake in spyware company NSO Group by Blackstone Group LP has reportedly fallen through. Reports of the deal attracted critical attention from a range of organizations, including Mexican NGOs involved in investigating NSO, Access Now, and Business and Human Rights.
Covers possible due diligence failures at NSO Group, misuse by several customers, and an ongoing investigation by the Mexican Government.
This report describes an espionage operation using government-exclusive spyware to target Mexican government food scientists and two public health advocates.
Senior Research Fellow Bill Marczak was featured in a Vanity Fair article exploring his discovery of the spyware used to target UAE dissident Ahmed Mansoor, detailed in a recent Citizen Lab report.