2 Indian scribes targeted by Pegasus, says report

New Delhi, December 28

An American newspaper claims that Amnesty International’s Security Lab has detected evidence that Pegasus spyware was used to infiltrate the mobile phones of two journalists in India.

A day after Apple warned independent Indian journalists and Opposition politicians in October that government hackers probably tried to break into their iPhones, officials under PM Narendra Modi promptly took action against Apple, which included putting pressure on the company’s executives in India to themselves downplay the significance of the warning they had just issued to iPhone users, the report stated based on conversations with three anonymous sources.

Reacting to the story, Minister of State for Electronics Rajeev Chandrasekhar pointed out that the article left out Apple’s response on October 31, the day it issued a threat notification. “Apple does not attribute the threat notifications to any specific state-sponsored attacker,” he noted.