US-backed Israeli company's spyware used to target European journalists

> Ciro Pellegrino, who heads the Naples newsroom of an investigative news outlet called Fanpage.it, received a notice on April 29 that his iPhone had been targeted. Last year, Fanpage secretly infiltrated the youth wing of Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party and filmed some of them making fascist and racist remarks.

It's never a good look going after journalists, but this seems especially petty.

There is now a rich history in outsourcing activities that would otherwise be illegal to other countries where it is legal. For example, the CIA's extreme rendition [1], knowingly sending prisoners to countries to be tortured and/or executed. This is how such countries make themselves useful to American empire.

Likewise, restrictions on the NSA spying on American citizens, for example, are bypassed by outsourcing that spying to, say, other Five Eyes countries.

Israel's role in this hacking phones of politicians, dissidents and now journalists on the behalf of the US and its allies, including Saudi Arabia [2].

The Israeli company NSO Group was sued by WhatsApp for their use of Pegasus [3], something Israel tried to intervene to block [4].

I honestly don't know how people work on things like Pegasus knowing it's being used to target and kill journalists and politicians.

[1]: https://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/rendition701/upda...

[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/17/world/middleeast/israel-s...

[3]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77n76kzmz4o

[4]: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/07/israels-attem...

Source: https://citizenlab.ca/2025/06/first-forensic-confirmation-of...

Same as happened in greece a few years back against the leader of opposition and journalists using Predator

> Graphite allows the operator to covertly access applications, including encrypted messengers like Signal and WhatsApp

That's pretty obvious. Signal doesn't protect you against full device compromise. Any app can trivially extract your signal conversations

How does the exploit work, though? The article does some real handwaving around "now the device is yours and now it's not". They don't need to go too deep but isn't anyone reading that far into the article going to be curious?

waay down, near the end of the article: "Paragon referred questions to a statement it gave to Israeli newspaper Haaretz, in which the company said that it stopped providing spyware to Italy after the government declined its offer to help investigate Cancellato’s case. "

Stuff like this will just keep happening unless a major jurisdiction goes after these digital mercinaries. The fact that we ignore all laws for no reason other than "our agencies really like spying on people" is laughable. Literally crime as a service, sanctioned by most governments. Should not be surprising that such criminal organizations use their tools to spy on people who don't deserve it.

This is my irritating reminder that there is a whole marketplace of implant/CNE products, most of which you have never heard of, produced in basically every jurisdiction in the world.

It used to be NSO Group that got all the press, now it's Paragon, and I think it's all for the good that the spotlight gets shone on these companies, but do keep in mind that this is not an "Israeli" phenomenon. There are American companies selling tooling that is more effective than "Graphite"; they're just more careful about publicity. Wherever it is you live that you feel is morally superior to America and Israel on commercialized CNE, you're likely to end up surprised.

Why was it leaked, by whom and why now? That all victims of paragon were notified by whatsApp or Apple is highly unlikely IMO. Or at least less likely than the possibility of Israeli circles or paragon itself being the origin of the leak.

I feel like anyone serious about doing actual journalism needs to start with a decent Cyber Security 101 course. Does anyone know of one?

>“We’ve seen first-hand how commercial spyware can be weaponized to target journalists and civil society, and these companies must be held accountable,” a spokesperson for WhatsApp told AP in an email.

Is it just me or is this statement written in a way that implies they think spying on people is acceptable just not in this specific circumstance?

It's amazing that US and Israel are the only countries mentioned in the headline

While the story itself is about Italy spying on a journalist in another EU country

But I guess news sites needs them clicks

Just a small part of the biggest spy network ever invented, which is woven into practically all software and tech infrastructure we use in the West and backed by large corporations with ties to that small country.

North Korean and Chinese hackers are soundly shunned but for some reason it's always a "company" from a pariah country like Apartheid Israel that are able to sell their software weapons to indiscriminately target any civilian from any country.

To give more context copy pasting my comment from a similar thread

I would like to add that Paragon disagrees with COPASIR: (article in italian) https://www.fanpage.it/politica/paragon-smentisce-il-copasir... They offered to give some information about who was surveilled by whom, but not surprisingly the Italian government refused (it was used by 2 secret service agencies in italy). At this point, Paragon stopped giving its access to Italian agencies (spying on journalists is forbidden by Paragon'S tos). COPASIR say they are the ones who stopped the commercial relationships though, so it is clear as water that at least one party isn't telling the truth

Buzzword Bingo

I would love to see how they target GrapheneOS. iPhone is easy to break, GrapheneOS is not

Who cares at this point?

If you're a journalist and you don't have basic OPSEC for cyber stuff, there is no point in doing sensitive work.

Nobody is really accountable for those kind of things anyway.

Thanks Cloudflare for blocking apnews.com! Thanks LLM scrapers that ruin the Internet and make that necessary!

Humans invented computers, which are capable of nearly-perfect security, but we have to make do with barely-working security, because we can't stop spying on each other.

Humans were a mistake.

Oh look Apple devices were hacked again. Security through obscurity isnt really working out. Their big cash apparently isnt enough.

I have sensitive data on my phone that I must carry around, and there is no way I'd ever keep it on an iphone. 'Pegasus' was the moment corporations and governments should have banned iphones for their terrible security.