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             BJP leader Subramanian Swamy on Sunday morning tweeted "Strong rumour that this evening IST, Washington Post & London Guardian are publishing a report exposing the hiring of an Israeli firm Pegasus, for tapping phones of Modi’s Cabinet Ministers, RSS leaders, SC judges, & journalists. If I get this confirmed I will publish the list".

Strong rumour that this evening IST, Washington Post & London Guardian are publishing a report exposing the hiring of an Israeli firm Pegasus, for tapping phones of Modi’s Cabinet Ministers, RSS leaders, SC judges, & journalists. If I get this confirmed I will publish the list.

— Subramanian Swamy (@Swamy39) July 18, 2021

Military-grade malware from an Israel-based NSO Group is reportedly being used to spy on journalists, human rights activists and political dissidents. The leaked list, shared with the news outlets by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based journalism nonprofit, and rights group Amnesty International, showed the identities of people targeted with more than 300 verified mobile phone numbers from India. These belong to two ministers in the Modi government, over 40 journalists, three opposition leaders and one sitting judge, besides scores of business persons and activists.

https://t.co/aOvXxEnGYH#PegasusProject #phonetapping

— Mumbai Press Club (@mumbaipressclub) July 19, 2021

With many on social media recalling the infamous Watergate scandal that former US President Richard Nixon had found himself embroiled in, Swamy had a warning for the administration.

The allegations about the use of the malware, known as Pegasus, were published on Sunday as part of a global investigation by the Washington Post, the Guardian and 14 other media organisations, including The Wire in India.

In second tweet on Monday morning Swamy cautioned "It will be sensible if the Home Minister tells Parliament that Modi Government has nor had any involvement with the Israeli company which tapped and taped our telephones. Otherwise like Watergate truth will trickle out and hurt BJP by halal route," 

It will be sensible if the Home Minister tells Parliament that Modi Government has nor had any involvement with the Israeli company which tapped and taped our telephones. Otherwise like Watergate truth will trickle out and hurt BJP by halal route.

— Subramanian Swamy (@Swamy39) July 19, 2021

The government, however, dismissed allegations of any kind of surveillance on its part on specific people, saying it "has no concrete basis or truth associated with it whatsoever". Asserting that "India is a robust democracy that is committed to ensuring the right to privacy to all its citizens as a fundamental right", the government dismissed the media report as an attempt to playing "the role of an investigator, prosecutor as well as jury".

But befor swamy Rahul gandhi tweeted on 16th July 2021 " I’m wondering what you guys are reading these days " . That means Mr Gandhi already know what Pegasus reading on his phone.
 

I’m wondering what you guys are reading these days.

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) July 16, 2021

On July 19 Rahul Gandhi again tweeted that "We know what he’s been reading- everything on your phone!"

We know what he’s been reading- everything on your phone!#Pegasus https://t.co/d6spyji5NA

— Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) July 19, 2021

Gandhi’s phone numbers, which he has since given up, appear to have been selected for targeting between 2018 and mid-2019, when the parliamentary elections were held in India.

The Congress party on Monday demanded an investigation into the roles of Modi and his closest aide, Home Minister Amit Shah, in the scandal.

“Our first demand is the immediate sacking of Minister of Home and Internal Security Amit Shah and a probe into the role of the prime minister in the matter,” Surjewala said.

Among others whose phone numbers were reportedly targeted are a top virologist, a woman who had accused a former chief justice of India of rape, a former election commissioner who oversaw the 2019 national polls, and leading political strategist Prashant Kishor.


What is the Pegasus Project?
Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International had access to a list of tens of thousands of phone numbers worldwide that were potentially targeted by Pegasus spyware, and shared it with media organisations from different countries.

While Forbidden Stories oversaw the investigation, called the Pegasus Project, Amnesty’s International’s Security Lab provided forensic analyses and technical support during the probe.

Pegasus is spyware owned by NSO Group, an Israeli technology firm. It enables the remote surveillance of smartphones, secretly unlocks the contents of a target’s mobile phone and transforms it into a listening device.

The firm claims the spyware is sold exclusively to “vetted governments” around the world to combat “terrorism” and other serious crimes. The company, which does not confirm the identity of its customers, has termed the Pegasus Project’s findings “exaggerated and baseless”.

Worried about cyber-attacks? Want to keep yourself as digitally secure as possible?

Here are 8 tips to help. pic.twitter.com/nGvbSSYhuK

— Amnesty International (@amnesty) July 19, 2021

Though the Indian government has not accepted so far whether any of its agencies is using the spyware, the investigation suggests the widespread and continuing abuse of the hacking spyware in the country.

Indian news website The Wire, along with The Guardian and The Washington Post on Monday reported that most of these individuals, including Gandhi, were targeted in the run-up to the 2019 national elections, which saw Modi return to power with a bigger majority than in 2014.

The expose has caused a major political controversy in India with the Congress calling Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) the “Bharatiya Jasoos Party” – “jasoos” means a spy in Hindi – and accusing it of listening to people’s “bedroom conversations”.


Who all were targeted in India?
Though it is not known how many of the phones on the list were targeted for surveillance or how many of those attempts were successful, The Washington Post said forensic analyses performed on 22 smartphones in India whose numbers appeared on the list showed that at least 10 were targeted with Pegasus, seven of them successfully.

Among the Indians whose phones had been targeted with the NSO-owned spyware was Ashok Lavasa, the former election commissioner of India, who had faulted Modi for violations of the model code of conduct before the 2019 election.

Of all the cases of Pegasus snooping, the one of the accuser of Chief Justice Gogoi is the worst and most heart breaking. Basically if you are a woman pitted against a powerful man you won’t get justice. Can there be anything more shameful that that?

— Rohini Singh (@rohini_sgh) July 20, 2021

Also, at least 11 of those phone numbers belonged to a former Supreme Court staffer and her family. The woman, whose identity cannot be revealed for legal reasons, had accused former Chief Justice of India, Ranjan Gogoi, of rape in April 2019 and was soon fired from her job.

The expose said the phone numbers belonging to the woman and her family began to be surveilled the same week when her allegations against Gogoi were first reported. Gogoi is currently a BJP member of the Indian parliament.

Also appearing in the Pegasus spyware list are more than 40 Indian journalists belonging to different news organisations.

Vijaita Singh, who covers internal security for The Hindu newspaper, is among them. She told that until a few days ago, she was not aware of any intrusion into her phone.

“It was disconcerting and unsettling,” she said. “These days, our phones literally contain every aspect of our lives.”

Journalist Ritika Chopra covers India’s election commission and education ministry for the Indian Express newspaper.

She said she discovered that her phone number figured in a leaked list of potential targets of surveillance only last week after The Wire reached out to her, seeking a comment.

“I was told that I was possibly targeted in 2019. I would not like to speculate on who is behind this. This is a breach of my privacy and freedom, but it will not affect my work as a journalist,” Chopra told Al Jazeera.

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, writer and former editor of Economic and Political Weekly, whose phone was also compromised, told the expose has had a “chilling effect” on him.

“It sends out a signal and a message to others that you can be snooped on,” he told

Thakurta said a “very small section” of the Indian media is “actually playing the role of the fourth state and holding truth to power”.

“Look at who these 40-plus journalists are? They are all journalists who have been critical of the government, so this is clearly sending a message that we can invade your privacy,” he said.

What does the government say?
At least two serving ministers in the Modi government – Ashwini Vaishnaw and Prahlad Singh Patel – also feature in the leaked database of numbers believed to be selected by clients of the NSO Group as potential targets for surveillance.

Ironically, Vaishnaw, who was recently inducted as information technology minister, on Monday defended the government on the issue in the parliament, saying the expose was an “attempt to malign Indian democracy and its well-established institutions”.

“In the past, similar allegations were made [about the use of Pegasus] on WhatsApp but there is no factual basis to these and have been categorically denied,” he said.

Vaishnaw said “any form of illegal surveillance” is not possible with the “checks and balances in our laws and robust institutions”.

Home Minister Shah alleged the Pegasus Project report published by the “disrupters” was timed to help the “obstructers” in the parliament as it began its monsoon session.

“Disrupters are the global organisations which do not like India to progress. Obstructers are political players in India who do not want India to progress. People of India are very good at understanding this chronology and connection,” he said on Monday.

In a statement on Monday, Access Now, an organisation defending the digital rights of global users, said it was outraged that products sold by NSO were allegedly “used to hack and invade the private communications” of thousands of people across the globe.

Raman Jit Singh Chima, Asia Pacific Policy Director and Global Cybersecurity Lead at Access Now, told that hacking is a crime, with no exceptions to be made even if it is directed by a government. He demanded that the Indian government must answer whether its agencies or security services were dealing with NSO.

“Previous statements have evaded the question, and vaguely asserted that safeguards are followed to avoid overboard surveillance. This is clearly not the case,” he said.

“The largest democracy in the world cannot be at the mercy of a shady, private company.”

NSO Group software can record your calls, copy your messages and secretly film you

It is the name for perhaps the most powerful piece of spyware ever developed – certainly by a private company. Once it has wormed its way on to your phone, without you noticing, it can turn it into a 24-hour surveillance device. It can copy messages you send or receive, harvest your photos and record your calls. It might secretly film you through your phone’s camera, or activate the microphone to record your conversations. It can potentially pinpoint where you are, where you’ve been, and who you’ve met.

Pegasus is the hacking software – or spyware – that is developed, marketed and licensed to governments around the world by the Israeli company NSO Group. It has the capability to infect billions of phones running either iOS or Android operating systems.

The earliest version of Pegasus discovered, which was captured by researchers in 2016, infected phones through what is called spear-phishing – text messages or emails that trick a target into clicking on a malicious link.


Since then, however, NSO’s attack capabilities have become more advanced. Pegasus infections can be achieved through so-called “zero-click” attacks, which do not require any interaction from the phone’s owner in order to succeed. These will often exploit “zero-day” vulnerabilities, which are flaws or bugs in an operating system that the mobile phone’s manufacturer does not yet know about and so has not been able to fix.

In 2019 WhatsApp revealed that NSO’s software had been used to send malware to more than 1,400 phones by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability. Simply by placing a WhatsApp call to a target device, malicious Pegasus code could be installed on the phone, even if the target never answered the call. More recently NSO has begun exploiting vulnerabilities in Apple’s iMessage software, giving it backdoor access to hundreds of millions of iPhones. Apple says it is continually updating its software to prevent such attacks.

Technical understanding of Pegasus, and how to find the evidential breadcrumbs it leaves on a phone after a successful infection, has been improved by research conducted by Claudio Guarnieri, who runs Amnesty International’s Berlin-based Security Lab.

“Things are becoming a lot more complicated for the targets to notice,” said Guarnieri, who explained that NSO clients had largely abandoned suspicious SMS messages for more subtle zero-click attacks.

For companies such as NSO, exploiting software that is either installed on devices by default, such as iMessage, or is very widely used, such as WhatsApp, is especially attractive, because it dramatically increases the number of mobile phones Pegasus can successfully attack.

As the technical partner of the Pegasus project, an international consortium of media organisations including the Guardian, Amnesty’s lab has discovered traces of successful attacks by Pegasus customers on iPhones running up-to-date versions of Apple’s iOS. The attacks were carried out as recently as July 2021.

Forensic analysis of the phones of victims has also identified evidence suggesting NSO’s constant search for weaknesses may have expanded to other commonplace apps. In some of the cases analysed by Guarnieri and his team, peculiar network traffic relating to Apple’s Photos and Music apps can be seen at the times of the infections, suggesting NSO may have begun leveraging new vulnerabilities.

Where neither spear-phishing nor zero-click attacks succeed, Pegasus can also be installed over a wireless transceiver located near a target, or, according to an NSO brochure, simply manually installed if an agent can steal the target’s phone.

Once installed on a phone, Pegasus can harvest more or less any information or extract any file. SMS messages, address books, call history, calendars, emails and internet browsing histories can all be exfiltrated.

“When an iPhone is compromised, it’s done in such a way that allows the attacker to obtain so-called root privileges, or administrative privileges, on the device,” said Guarnieri. “Pegasus can do more than what the owner of the device can do.”

Lawyers for NSO claimed that Amnesty International’s technical report was conjecture, describing it as “a compilation of speculative and baseless assumptions”. However, they did not dispute any of its specific findings or conclusions.

NSO has invested substantial effort in making its software difficult to detect and Pegasus infections are now very hard to identify. Security researchers suspect more recent versions of Pegasus only ever inhabit the phone’s temporary memory, rather than its hard drive, meaning that once the phone is powered down virtually all trace of the software vanishes.

One of the most significant challenges that Pegasus presents to journalists and human rights defenders is the fact that the software exploits undiscovered vulnerabilities, meaning even the most security-conscious mobile phone user cannot prevent an attack.

Conclusion

All above and recent incidents happen in India. We had in a conclusion that Modi and Amit shah each step was according to information they received. They know each movement and decision of their opposition. And through this they understand the weakness of their opposition people and they work accordingly. Moreover, if you are right then no need to worry, people who are worried about Pegasus, either their moral side is weak, or they are involved in anti-national activity or they are involved in other scam or smuggling or they are in contact with anti-national to destroy country or ruling party. Indian parliament opens amid Pegasus spyware row and all other issues will not discussed now this will help BJP and Modi "If your diet is good then you can open your mouth without fear" So Pegasus not affect BJP or MODI but oppositions need to worry.