'Concrete proof' of Pegasus use in India, experts tell SC-appointed committee

Petitioners before the apex court asked the researchers to testify before the panel probing the illegal use of Pegasus to surveil citizens

Two cybersecurity experts have told the Supreme Court-appointed committee on the Pegasus issue that there is concrete evidence that the application was used to spy on the devices of the petitioners, The Indian Express reported.

Petitioners before the apex court asked these researchers to testify before the panel probing the illegal use of Pegasus to surveil citizens. One of the researchers reviewed iPhones of seven people and found Pegasus spyware in two of them. One of the phones was infected in April 2018, while the other saw the spyware develop between June and July 2021, the report said.

Last week, The New York Times reported that Pegasus and a missile system were the “centrepieces” of a roughly $2 billion deal of sophisticated weapons and intelligence gear between India and Israel in 2017.

"Multiple entries going back to March 2021 indicating that the Pegasus malware tried to delete entries from the process table databases," the researcher said in an affidavit submitted to the apex court.

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The other researcher found different versions of Pegasus on all the six Android they analysed, with four containing varied versions of the malware and two containing the original.

“We have an emulator for Android on which we verified that it has all the variants of the malware. What we found is that this (malware) is so virulent that it could not have been used for legitimate purposes. It not only reads your chats, it can get your videos, turn the audio or video at any time,” the researcher is quoted as saying.

In October last year, the Supreme Court set up a three-member independent expert panel to probe the alleged use of Pegasus for targeted surveillance, observing the state cannot get a "free pass" every time the spectre of national security is raised and that its mere invocation cannot render the judiciary a "mute spectator" and be the bugbear it shies away from.

The committee issued a public notice and set a deadline of January 7 for people to approach it with their submissions. The panel asked citizens who have “reasonable cause to suspect” that his or her mobile has been compromised due to “specific usage” of Pegasus.

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An international investigative consortium had claimed that many Indian ministers, politicians, activists, businessmen and journalists were potentially targeted by the NSO Group's phone hacking software.

The report said that since 2011 when NSO “introduced” Pegasus to the global market, it had “helped Mexican authorities capture Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the drug lord known as El Chapo.” European investigators have quietly used Pegasus to thwart terrorist plots, fight organised crime and, in one case, take down a global child-abuse ring, identifying dozens of suspects in more than 40 countries, it said.

(With DHNS/agency inputs)

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