"pegasus" Dangerous program on the phone that is capable of capturing all confidential information on your phone

Pegasus: a spy program sold to totalitarian governments to investigate people.

Justice activists, journalists and lawyers around the world have been targeted by a malicious mobile phone program sold to dictatorial governments by one Israeli company, media reports say.

The men are on a list of 50,000 phone numbers of people being tracked by customers of the company, NSO Group, leaked to the media.

It was not immediately clear where the list came from - or how many phones there were.

The NSO denies any wrongdoing.

It says the program is intended to be used against criminals and terrorists and is only available to soldiers, law enforcement and intelligence agencies from countries with good human rights records.

It said the initial investigation that led to the reports, by the Paris-based non-governmental organization Forbidden Stories and the human rights organization Amnesty International, "was riddled with misinformation and theories that have no proof".

The allegations against the use of the program, known as Pegasus, were published Sunday by the Washington Post, Guardian, Le Monde and 14 other media organizations around the world.

Pegasus can capture iPhones and Android devices and download messages, photos and emails, record phone calls and turn on the microphone and camera secretly.

What do we know about the target audience?

The numbers on the list were not released, but media outlets investigating the allegations said they had detected more than 1,000 people in 50 countries.

Among them are politicians and presidents of the country, senior business executives, activists, and several family members of the United Arab Emirates. More than 180 journalists were also featured on the list, from organizations including CNN, New York Times and Al Jazeera.

Most numbers were collected in 10 countries: Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Hungary, India, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Morocco, Rwanda, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, according to the reports.

When questioned by the organizations involved in the investigation, spokesmen for these countries denied that Pegasus was used to deny that they misused their surveillance powers.

It was not immediately clear how many calls on the list were targeted, but a detailed analysis of 37 calls showed there was a "trial and success", the Washington Post reported

This includes people close to Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed while visiting the small Saudi Arabian embassy in Istanbul, Turkey, in October 2018 and his body mutilated.

Investigations found that spy programs were installed on his fiancé's phone a few days after his murder, and that his wife's phone was targeted by similar programs between September 2017 and April 2018.

The NSO group said its technology was "not linked in any way to the killings".

The phone of Mexican journalist Cecilio Pineda Birto also appeared twice on the list, as well as a month before his assassination, an investigation revealed.

His phone disappeared from the scene of the murder so an investigation was not possible, but the NSO said that even if his phone was targeted, that did not mean that the data collected was linked to his murder.

More details on who is targeted are expected to be released in the future.

WhatsApp sued the NSO in 2019, alleging that the company caused online attacks on 1,400 mobile phones belonging to Pegasus. At the time, the NSO denied any wrongdoing, but the company was banned from using WhatsApp.

The allegations here are not new but what is new is the level of targeting innocent people. About 200 authors from 21 countries have their phone numbers on this list and more names of celebrities will be revealed.

There is a lot that is not known in these claims - as well as where the list comes from and how many phone numbers are fully targeted by the app. The NSO group has once again come forward to deny all charges but it is a blow to a company trying to rectify its reputation.

Just two weeks ago they released the first "transparency report" outlining human rights policies and commitments. Amnesty International ignored the 32-page report as a "Certificate to Improve Sales".

These recent allegations will damage its reputation even more, but it will not hurt the company financially. There are very few private companies that can offer the type of spy tools that the NSO sells, and currently the unregulated market for such programs is booming.