Earlier in July, a group of security researchers revealed that they had been working together to uncover a widespread surveillance of journalists, politicians, government officials, chief executives, and human rights activists. The tool of choice for these activities was the Israeli NSO Group’s Pegasus, a tool that can be deployed on Android and Apple smartphones with a great deal of stealth. In this blog post for Avast, I explain the collaboration, link to various media reports about what they found out, and ways that you can protect yourself — although the chances that you will become a target of this spyware are pretty slim.

Frontline, the PBS documentary, has put together a two part series on what the journalists working on the project found in January 2023.