A former member of the European Parliament who served on a committee investigating abusive surveillance was himself hacked using an Israeli-made spy tool, a Canadian tech watchdog group said on Friday.
Citizen Lab said in a report that the phone of Stelios Kouloglou, a Greek television journalist-turned-lawmaker, was hacked at least three times between October 2022 and March 2023 using Pegasus spyware, a tool distributed by the Israeli company NSO Group.
At the time of the targeting, Kouloglou was serving on the European Parliament's PEGA Committee, which was set up in 2022 to examine the use of illegal phone hacking across the European Union. The committee focused mainly on the use of Pegasus and similar tools, finding that governments across the EU likely used spyware, "in one way or another, some legitimate, some illegitimate."
Kouloglou said he was astonished at the audacity of whoever was behind the hacking.
"I was not expecting that a PEGA member would be spied on by Pegasus," he told Reuters. "I was not expecting that they would be as reckless as that."
NSO did not return messages seeking comment.
NSO was blacklisted by the U.S. government in 2021 over human rights and national security concerns. Last year, WhatsApp owner Meta Platforms META.O won a $168 million damages award against NSO for unlawfully hacking the platform, although the award was significantly reduced. (Reuters)
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