NSO group’s Pegasus spyware
was used to secretly target two women close to Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi
columnist who was killed inside the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul in
2018, according to digital forensic analysis carried out by Amnesty
International.

The Android phone belonging to
Khashoggi’s wife, Hanan Elatr, was targeted by a Pegasus user six months before
he was assassinated, The Washington Post reported on July 18. The digital
forensic analysis could not determine whether the hack was successful.  

The iPhone of his fiancée,
Hatice Cengiz, was penetrated by spyware days after the murder, the forensic
analysis showed.

The cellphone numbers of these
two women feature in a list of 50,000 numbers concentrated in countries known
to have been NSO clients.

One more associate of Khashoggi
was also hacked into after the journalist’s murder. Two other associates and
two senior Turkish officials involved in his homicide investigation appear on
the list.

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The NSO group however has
emphatically denied that its government clients used its hacking malware to
target the journalist or his family, reports the Guardian.

But according to the forensic
digital examination carried out by Amnesty International’s Security Lab, a
Pegasus user did send texts to Khashoggi’s wife Elatr. The user reportedly
masqueraded as her sister twice and sent her links, once in November 2017 and
again in April 2018, six months before Khashoggi’s murder.

Elatr says she has no memory
of clicking on the links and because she used an Android phone, Amnesty’s
researcher was unable to determine whether the device was successfully penetrated
as Android does not log the kind of information that determining this requires,
unlike iPhones.

In the months before Khashoggi’s
murder, Elatr and Khashoggi would talk and text multiple times a week and even
met in person on three occasions.

“Jamal warned me before that
this might happen. It makes me believe they are aware of everything that
happened to Jamal through me,” she said in recent interviews. Pegasus can steal
a phone’s content and turn on its microphone for real-time monitoring, say cybersecurity
experts.

After Khashoggi’s murder,
someone using Pegasus targeted his fiancé Cengiz’s iPhone. Cengiz had
accompanied Khashoggi to the gates of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul as he
went in to pick up documents in October 2018.

Her cellphone was breached
four days after Khashoggi’s murder and then five times in the days after, the
Amnesty analysis found. At the time, the two women did not know each other.