European lawmaker probing Pegasus abuses was hacked with Pegasus, report says
A watchdog turns out to have been watched
A Greek politician who spent 2022 investigating spyware abuse across Europe was himself hacked with Pegasus spyware, according to a new forensic analysis from the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.
Stelios Kouloglou, a longtime investigative journalist and former member of the European Parliament, says he was shocked to learn that his iPhone had been compromised while he was serving on the Parliament’s PEGA Committee, which was created to examine the use of Pegasus and similar tools.
“I was not expecting that,” Kouloglou told WIRED. He said the discovery left him angry, adding that being on the committee “investigating Pegasus and at the same time being hacked by Pegasus” was “something really too reckless.”
Citizen Lab says Kouloglou’s phone was targeted multiple times. The researchers did not identify who was behind the attacks, but said the intrusions could have exposed internal committee information and potentially violated European Parliament confidentiality rules as well as the privacy of people discussed in the probe.
A familiar spyware with a wider reach
Pegasus, developed by Israeli firm NSO Group, has been under scrutiny for years. First identified by Citizen Lab in 2016, the spyware can exploit mobile operating system flaws to infect iPhones and Android devices, giving operators access to messages, contact lists, browsing history, photos, microphone and camera feeds, and other data.
The Citizen Lab report says this is the first time a member of the PEGA Committee has been identified as a Pegasus victim while working on the investigation. For researchers, the case underscores how persistent the threat remains even in institutions tasked with examining it.
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, said the episode highlights how widespread and brazen spyware targeting has become in Europe. “It’s open spyware season on Europe’s lawmakers,” he said. “The European Parliament, national parliaments, nobody is prepared.”
NSO did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment on the findings.
The revelation lands as Europe continues to grapple with the political fallout from spyware abuse — and with the possibility that those assigned to investigate it may themselves be in the crosshairs.
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