New York Times / by Vindu Goel & Nicole Perlroth
Recent revelations in India show that the threat from the company’s spyware to activists and journalists isn’t limited to autocratic regimes.
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The Wire / by The Wire Analysis
While the home ministry says reports have attempted to malign the Centre, we need to know who wanted to snoop on Indian targets and how successful they were.
New Delhi: The Narendra Modi government on Thursday sought a detailed response from WhatsApp over the issue of an Israeli spyware allegedly being used to target Indian journalists and human rights activists through its platform.
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The Wire / by Sukanya Shantha and Anuj Srivas
Just around the time when news of Israeli spyware Pegasus being used to target activists and human rights lawyers was breaking in India, Partho Sarothi Ray, a 42-year-old Kolkata-based molecular biologist, was dealing with another peculiar problem.
His Yahoo email account had received an alarming message from the technology company: “We believe your Yahoo account may have been the target of government-backed actors, which means that they could gain access to the information in your account.”
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The Indian Express / by Nandagopal Rajan
WhatsApp claims it detected the attack in May 2019 and found that NSO exploited a “buffer overflow vulnerability in WhatsApp VOIP stack” to send its Pegasus malware to the target devices, even without the users answering the calls they received.
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National Herald / by Aakar Patel
The Modi govt has not yet denied acquiring the spyware. In any case, it takes assistance of pvt companies and individuals in IT investigations; hacking is often unauthorised and conviction around 1%.
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Scroll.in / by Scroll Staff
In response to the Centre’s notice, Facebook-owned WhatsApp attached a vulnerability note filed in May and a letter sent in September about the privacy breach.
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The Asian Age / by The Asian Age
New Delhi: The activist lawyer Prashant Bhushan will move the Supreme Court for investigation into the hacking of the WhatsApp accounts of the human right activists, lawyers and journalists seeking to know whose phones were tapped and at whose instance.
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Sabrangindia / by Sabrangindia
The Whatsapp Snoopgate issue that spread like wildfire, not only had the general public under its attack, but lawyers defending the human rights activists arrested under the controversial Bhima Koregaon case have also confirmed that their phones were being targeted by Pegasus, a the surveillance software developed by Israeli company NSO group that came to be in question, The Huffington Post report.
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The Hindu / by Sharad Vyas, Ajeet Mahale
The spyware attack on WhatsApp users targeted over a dozen civil rights activists, lawyers and journalists in Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh and Goa.
The activists connected to the Bhima-Koregaon and Elgar Parishad cases said they would be approaching the court for action, while the Nationalist Congress Party demanded that Maharashtra Governor Bhagat Singh Koshyari institute a probe.
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en | 22 min | 2019
The Wire / #BeyondTheHeadlines with Siddharth Varadarajan
Thanks to WhatsApp taking on the Israeli firm NSO for installing the ‘Pegasus’ malware on rights activists around the world, India’s dirty surveillance secrets are slowly tumbling out. In this episode of Beyond the Headlines, Siddharth Varadarajan looks at the manner in which individuals connected to the Bhima Koregaon case have been targeted and asks what the legal basis for this snooping is?
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