Cyberattackers used services of US and UK companies

Galina Timchenko targeted by Pegasus spyware

The Committee to Protect Journalists is deeply disturbed by the findings of an investigation that the phone of exiled Russian journalist Galina Timchenko was infected by Pegasus surveillance spyware while she was in Germany earlier this year.

“Journalists and their sources are not free and safe if they are spied on,” said Gulnoza Said, CPJ’s Europe and Central Asia program coordinator. “This attack on Timchenko underscores that governments must implement an immediate moratorium on the development, sale, and use of spyware technologies. The threat is simply too large to ignore.”

Timchenko’s phone was infected by Pegasus, a spyware produced by the Israeli company NSO Group, according to a Meduza report and a joint-investigation by rights groups Access Now and research organization Citizen Lab. The infection took place shortly after Russia’s Prosecutor General designated Meduza as an “undesirable” organization –  a measure that banned the outlet from operating on Russian territory.

Read CPJ’s report on spyware’s threat to press freedom and the organization’s call for export controls on the technology.