From Pearl to Pegasus Bahraini Government Hacks Activists with NSO Group
Zero-Click iPhone Exploits
By Bill Marczak, Ali Abdulemam1, Noura Al-Jizawi, Siena Anstis, Kristin Berdan,
John Scott-Railton, and Ron Deibert
August 24, 2021
Summary & Key Findings
We identified nine Bahraini activists whose iPhones were successfully
hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware between June 2020 and February 2021.
Some of the activists were hacked using two zero-click iMessage exploits: the
2020 KISMET exploit and a 2021 exploit that we call FORCEDENTRY.
The hacked activists included three members of Waad (a secular Bahraini
political society), three members of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, two
exiled Bahraini dissidents, and one member of Al Wefaq (a Shiite Bahraini
political society).
At least four of the activists were hacked by LULU, a Pegasus operator that
we attribute with high confidence to the government of Bahrain, a well-known
abuser of spyware. One of the activists was hacked in 2020 several hours after
they revealed during an interview that their phone was hacked with Pegasus in
2019.
Two of the hacked activists now reside in London, and at least one was in
London when they were hacked. In our research, we have only ever seen the
Bahrain government spying in Bahrain and Qatar; never in Europe. Thus, the
Bahraini activist in London may have been hacked by a Pegasus operator
associated with a different government.
We shared a list of the targeted phone numbers we identified with Forbidden
Stories. They confirmed that numbers associated with five of the hacked devices
were contained on the Pegasus Project’s list of potential targets of NSO
Group’s customers, data that Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International
describe as dating from 2016 up to several years ago.
Read the full report here:
https://citizenlab.ca/2021/08/bahrain-hacks-activists-with-nso-group-zero-click-iphone-exploits/
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