Dozens of Al Jazeera journalists targeted in apparent iOS spyware attack

Summary (IA Generated)

36 personal phones belonging to Al Jazeera journalists, producers, anchors, and executives were hacked in a spyware campaign between July and August 2020, a new report from Citizen Lab alleges.

The attacks reportedly used Pegasus technology provided by the Israeli firm NSO Group, and are thought to be the work of four operators.

According to Citizen Lab, the attacks seem to have used a zero-click exploit to compromise iPhones via iMessage, meaning the attacks happened without the victims needing to do anything, and leave much less of a trace once a device is infected.

iOS 14 is not thought to be vulnerable Citizen Lab’s report says “almost all iPhone devices” which haven’t been updated to iOS 14 appear to be vulnerable to the hack, meaning the infections it found are likely to be a “miniscule fraction” of the total number.

Citizen Lab discovered one of the hacks after Al Jazeera journalist, Tamer Almisshal, allowed the organization to install a VPN on his device because he was worried it might have been compromised.

Using this software, Citizen Lab, noticed that his phone visited a suspected installation server for NSO Group’s spyware.

As well as the Al Jazeera employees, Citizen Lab reports that a journalist with Al Araby TV, Rania Dridi, was also the victim of hacks using NSO Group’s spyware.

This is not the first time allegations have emerged that spyware from NSO Group has been used to target journalists.