Hungarian journalism non-profit Direkt36 today published a major investigation into the use of NSO Group’s notorious Pegasus spyware in Hungary, revealing that the phones of more than 300 Hungarian nationals were identified as possible targets for infection. Experts from Amnesty International were able to confirm several cases where the spyware was successfully installed.

In June 2018, an Amnesty International staff member received a malicious WhatsApp message with Saudi Arabia-related bait content and carrying links Amnesty International believes are used to distribute and deploy sophisticated mobile spyware. Through the course of our subsequent investigation we discovered that a Saudi activist based abroad had also received similar malicious messages. In its analysis of these messages, Amnesty International found connections with a network of over 600 domain names. Not only are these domain names suspicious, but they also overlap with infrastructure that had previously been identified as part of Pegasus, a sophisticated commercial exploitation and spyware platform sold by the Israel surveillance vendor, NSO Group.