On 11 October 2024, the UK’s High Court ruled that Saudi activist Yahya Assiri can continue his legal challenge against Saudi Arabia for being targeted with spyware while living in the UK.
Responding to a Forbidden Stories-led investigation, supported by the Amnesty International’s Security Lab, on the government of Israel’s attempts to sway WhatsApp’s ongoing US lawsuit against spyware firm NSO Group, Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, Head of the Security Lab at Amnesty International, said:
Recent research by Security Lab partner organisations, Access Now, Citizen Lab and Reporters Without Borders has demonstrated the continued use of the highly invasive spyware Pegasus.
by Rebecca White
A sophisticated hacking campaign by a mercenary spyware company targeting Google’s Android operating system has been exposed by Amnesty International’s Security Lab.
This document is a joint technical report by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and Amnesty International’s Security Lab reviewing Front Line Defenders’ technical research.
FinSpy is a full-fledged surveillance software suite, capable of intercepting communications, accessing private data, and recording audio and video, from the computer or mobile devices it is silently installed on. FinSpy is produced by Munich-based company FinFisher Gmbh and sold to law enforcement and government agencies around the world. According to media reports, when Egyptian protesters broke into the offices of the now dissolved State Security Investigations Service, an intelligence body responsible for investigating security threats and notorious for committing grave human rights violations during Hosni Mubarak’s decades’ long rule, in 2011, they discovered contracts for the sale of FinSpy to Egyptian authorities. Since then, research groups such as Citizen Lab, at the University of Toronto, and Privacy International have discovered FinSpy being used to target HRDs and civil society in many countries, including Bahrain, Turkey and Ethiopia. Because of this, Amnesty International’s Security Lab tracks FinSpy usage and development as part of our continuous monitoring of digital threats to HRDs.
A Tel Aviv District Court today rejected an attempt, supported by Amnesty International, which sought to force Israel’s Ministry of Defence (MOD) to revoke the security export license of spyware company NSO Group.
In October 2019 Amnesty International published the report “Morocco: Human Rights Defenders Targeted with NSO Group’s Spyware”, where we detailed the targeting of Moroccan human rights defenders Maati Monjib and Abdessadak El Bouchattaoui using surveillance technology produced by the company NSO Group. In this current report, Amnesty International now reveals that Omar Radi, another prominent human rights defender and journalist from Morocco was also targeted using NSO Group’s tools.
Responding to a decision by Tel Aviv District Court on Thursday to close the doors of the hearing of a legal action seeking to revoke the export licence of spyware firm NSO Group, Danna Ingleton, Deputy Director of Amnesty Tech, said:
Israel must revoke the export license of NSO Group whose spyware products have been used in malicious attacks on human rights activists around the world, Amnesty International said ahead of the latest court case to embroil the tech firm.
Two prominent human rights defenders in Morocco have been targeted using surveillance technology developed by the Israeli-based company NSO Group, according to new research published by Amnesty Tech today.