Hi, I'm Ryan Levy.

Welcome to Cyber reasons Malicious Life. Oh. On July 18th, 2021, a French journalism nonprofit organization published details about what it labeled the biggest cyber surveillance

scandal since the Snowden revelations.

A year earlier, in 2020, an undisclosed source leaked the least of some 50,000 telephone

numbers to forbidden stories.

Phone numbers belonging to human rights activists, politicians, lawyers and journalists from 24 countries.

It was a diverse list which included somewhat obscure names such as Janos Banati, the president

of the Hungarian Bar Association and nine of his colleagues,

next to heads of states such as French President Emmanuel Macron and Muhammad the sixth,

King of Morocco.

In our coordinated effort, 80 investigative journalists from 17 media organizations

reached out to many of the people on the list, convinced them to

hand over their phones, and head them analyzed by Amnesty International's security lab.

The investigation revealed what almost all these different people had in common.

They were victims of sophisticated espionage campaigns carried out by authoritarian states

using the same spyware tool.

Pegasus, developed by the Israeli cyber intelligence firm,

NSO.

The spyware also gave the collective investigation its name, Project Pegasus.

The simultaneous release of hundreds of stories, documents and interviews by the various newspapers and online

publications had the effect that forbidden stories had hoped for.

All over the world, journalists and politicians expressed their outrage.

...