The cellphones of dozens of journalists and human rights defenders in El Salvador were repeatedly hacked with sophisticated spyware over the past year and a half, an Internet watchdog said on Wednesday.
Reporting on its latest findings about the use of the Israeli firm NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab said that it had identified a Pegasus operator working almost exclusively in El Salvador in early 2020.
While the researchers could not conclusively link the hacks to the Salvadoran government, the report said “the strong country-specific focus of the infections suggests that this is very likely.”
Sofia Medina, spokeswoman for Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, said in a statement that “El Salvador is no way associated with Pegasus and nor is a client of NSO Group.”
She said the government does not have licenses to use this type of software, adding that it is investigating the use of Pegasus to hack phones in El Salvador.
Medina said that on Nov. 23 last year she, too, received an alert from Apple, as other victims did, saying that she might be a victim of state-sponsored hacking.
Salvadoran justice and security ministers received the same message that day, but the Citizen Lab investigation did not include government officials, Medina said.
NSO, which was blacklisted by the US government last year, says it sells its spyware only to legitimate government law enforcement and intelligence agencies vetted by the Israeli Ministry of Defense for use against terrorists and criminals.
Bukele, a highly popular president, has railed against his critics in El Salvador’s independent press, many of whom were targeted in the hacking attacks.
Citizen Lab conducted a forensic analysis of 37 devices after the owners suspected they could be the targets of hacking. Their investigation, carried out with Access Now, was reviewed by Amnesty International’s Security Lab.
John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at Citizen Lab and an author of the report, said that the “aggressiveness and persistence of the hacking was jaw-dropping.”
“I’ve seen a lot of Pegasus cases, but what was especially disturbing in this case was its juxtaposition with the physical threats and violent language against the media in El Salvador,” Scott-Railton said.
“This is the kind of thing that perhaps wouldn’t surprise you in a dictatorship, but at least on paper El Salvador is a democracy,” he said.
While Citizen Lab is not blaming the mass hack on the Bukele government, Scott-Railton said that all the circumstantial evidence points in that direction.
The victims are almost exclusively in El Salvador.
Twenty-two of those targeted work for the independent news site El Faro, which during the period of hacking was working on stories related to the Bukele administration’s alleged deal-making with Salvadoran street gangs to lower the homicide rate and support Bukele’s party in midterm elections in exchange for benefits to gang leaders.
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