The French government has responded to research by an international research consortium, according to which President Emmanuel Macron’s cell phone was targeted by the Pegasus spyware software.
From the Élysée Palace, on Tuesday evening, when asked: “If the allegations should prove to be correct, they would be very serious”. The revelations by the journalist group should be fully investigated. “We will of course not take this lightly,” said Gabriel Attal, the Élysée spokesman.
Apparently a Moroccan authority wanted to research the French president in 2019. One of the at least two numbers that Macron uses appeared in mid-2019 on a list of leaked telephone data that a network to which the Southgerman newspaper, NDR, WDR and The time belong.
Overall, the leak of the Pegasus project contains the telephone numbers of 14 heads of state or government who could have been victims of the cell phone spy Pegasus during their tenure.
Affected are, among others, the Yemeni Prime Minister Ahmed Obeid bin Daghr, Saad Hariri from Lebanon, Ruhakana Rugunda from Uganda, the Algerian Prime Minister Noureddine Bedoui, Mustafa Madbuli from Egypt, Prime Minister Saad-Eddine El Othmani from Morocco and Imran Khan, the Prime Minister of Pakistan.
The Paris-based non-profit editorial staff Forbidden Stories and the human rights organization Amnesty International were given access to the sensitive data, which they then shared with 18 editorial teams from ten countries.
According to the research, these are the numbers of potential spying targets that were targeted by customers of the Israeli espionage company NSO Group. With the Trojan developed and distributed by NSO called Pegasus, a digital cell phone spy, cell phones can be scanned and eavesdropped on without being noticed.
Emmanuel Macron is known for making excessive use of his cell phones, including for government activities. In the Pegasus project data there is now a telephone number that he has obtained from information from the SZ partner Le Monde used since at least 2017. Macron could also be reached on this number in the past few days.
In fact, it is unclear whether the phones of the politicians concerned were actually infected with the spyware. This evidence could only be provided through a forensic examination of the devices, which so far none of the politicians has officially approved.