French President Emmanuel Macron among potential targets of Pegasus: Reports
Paris/IBNS: Phone numbers used by French President Emmanuel Macron and top members of his government are among the potential targets for the Israeli spyware Pegasus, media reports.
"We found these numbers but we obviously couldn't do a technical analysis of Emmanuel Macron's phone" to determine if it had been infected with the malware, the head of Forbidden Stories, Laurent Richard, told LCI television.
"But it shows in any case there was an interest in doing it," he said.
"If this fact is established, it's obviously very serious," a spokesman for Macron's office said.
The data was accessed by Paris-based nonprofit journalism organisation Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International and then shared with the Guardian, The Wire and other media outlets as part of the Pegasus project.
Macron's phone number was among some 50,000 believed to have been identified as people of interest since 2016 by clients of the Israeli firm NSO, who is the developer of the Pegasus cyber-surveillance technology, media reports said.
Numbers of politicians, journalists and activists across the world have been potential targets of the spyware.
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