Spain is literally mired in a spy affair which, after having targeted several Catalan separatist leaders, now affects the Spanish government. In its Monday May 2 edition, the centre-left Spanish daily The country reveals that the Prime Minister, Pedro Sanchez, and the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, were spied on by the Israeli software Pegasus (designed by the Israeli company NSO), in May and June 2021 for the former, and in June 2021 for the second.
→ REREAD. Pegasus: understand everything about this cyber espionage case
NSO has always maintained that this software, the export of which requires the green light from the Israeli authorities, could only be sold to States, and only to help them fight against terrorism or crime. Once installed, it allows access to messaging, data or to remotely activate the cameras and microphones of a smartphone.
Hundreds of personalities spied on
Pegasus and therefore NSO have been the subject of serious accusations since a media consortium revealed last summer that this software had been used to spy on the phones of hundreds of women and men politicians, journalists, human rights activists or business leaders around the world.
Still according to information fromThe country, the hackers allegedly extracted a huge amount of data from the head of government’s phone and a lesser proportion from Margarita Robles’ phone. However, the Spanish government has said that it does not know “the nature of the stolen information and its degree of sensitivity”. But, in both cases, it is their professional and non-private telephones that are affected by the tapping.
An obvious security flaw
This discovery took place after the National Center for Cryptology (NCC) carried out a “forensic analysis” depth of the two motives, which Pedro Sanchez and Margarita Robles had to file for a period of between twenty-four and thirty-six hours. The routine periodic examinations to which the telephones of senior officials are subjected had not, until then, detected any intrusion indicating an obvious security breach.
→ EXPLANATION. Pegasus: what security for the president’s laptops?
During a press conference on Monday, May 2, the Minister of the Presidency Félix Bolanos denounced “facts of enormous gravity”. He pointed out that the government was not just suspicious, but “certainties”claiming that they were attacks “external”, without however saying that they emanated from a foreign country. «When we talk about outside intrusions, we mean that they are foreign to state agencies and do not have judicial authorization. That is why we classify them as illegal and external,” he explained.
Listening to separatists
The executive thus wanted to immediately clear the National Intelligence Center (CNI), the only Spanish agency that officially has the Pegasus program. The case is all the more sensitive in that it is yet another scandal in wiretapping. On April 18, Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity project at the Canadian University of Toronto, published a report identifying 65 people from the independence movement – mostly Catalans – whose laptops were allegedly hacked between 2017 and 2020 by the software. Pegasus. Immediately, the separatist leaders of Catalonia accused the CNI, and therefore the socialist government, in office since June 2018, of being responsible for this listening.
Pedro Sanchez then announced the launch of an internal investigation within the CNI and undertook to ” accountable “.