Paris: French President Emmanuel Macron has called an urgent national security meeting for Thursday to debate the Israeli-made Pegasus spyware after reports about its use in France emerged in the week , a government spokesman said.
“The president is following this subject closely and takes it very seriously,” Gabriel Attal told France Inter radio, adding that the unscheduled national security meeting would be “dedicated to the Pegasus issue and therefore the question of cybersecurity”.
A consortium of media companies, including the Washington Post, the Guardian and France’s Le Monde, reported on Tuesday that one among Macron’s phone numbers and people of the many cabinet ministers were on a leaked list of potential Pegasus targets.
The newspapers said that they had been unable to verify whether an attempted or successful hacking had taken place without forensically analysing the president’s phone.
Evidence of an attempted hacking was found on the device of former environment minister and shut Macron ally Francois de Rugy, with the attempt allegedly originating in Morocco.
De Rugy demanded on Tuesday that Morocco provide “explanations to France, to the French government and individuals like me, who was a member of the French government when there was an effort to hack and access the info on my mobile .”
The NSO Group has denied that Macron was among the targets of its clients.
We can “specifically begin and say needless to say that the president of France, Macron, wasn’t a target”, Chaim Gelfand, chief compliance officer at NSO Group, told Israeli television network i24 on Wednesday.
A source on the brink of Macron played down the danger to him, saying Wednesday that the 43-year-old leader had several phones which were “regularly changed, updated and secured”.
Speaking to AFP on condition of anonymity, the source said that his security settings were “the tightest possible”.
Other revelations in the week have alleged that close French ally Morocco, also targeted several high-profile journalists in France.
Prosecutors in Paris have opened a search following complaints from investigative website Mediapart and therefore the satirical newspaper Le Canard Enchaine.
Morocco has denied the claims, saying it “never acquired computer software to infiltrate communication devices”.
The joint media investigation into Pegasus identified a minimum of 180 journalists in 20 countries who were selected for potential targeting between 2016 to June 2021.
Pegasus can hack into mobile phones without a user knowing, enabling clients to read every message, track a user’s location and tap into the phone’s camera and microphone.
