A consortium of journalists gained access to a leak of more than 50,000 phone numbers entered into a system used for targeting by Pegasus, a sophisticated spyware product made by the Israeli company NSO Group. Governments around the world paid the company vast sums of money to gain access to Pegasus and let them use it to attack their targets.
Although the specific government agencies that purchased the software aren’t named in the data, their countries of origin can be deduced from the geographical clustering of the leaked phone numbers.
NSO Group insists that its software is meant to be used only against criminals and terrorists — but we found hundreds of journalists, activists, academics, lawyers, and even world leaders in the leak. In this interactive, you can explore a small sample of the data. It will be updated as more names are revealed.