Top rival of rulers hacked by spyware

WARSAW — Amnesty International said Thursday it has independently confirmed that powerful spyware from the Israeli surveillance software maker NSO Group was used to hack a Polish senator multiple times in 2019 when he was running the opposition’s parliamentary election campaign.

The Associated Press reported last month that Citizen Lab, an internet watchdog group at the University of Toronto, found that the senator, Krzysztof Brejza, and two other Polish government critics were hacked with NSO’s Pegasus spyware.

Dozens of high-profile cases of Pegasus abuse have been uncovered since 2015, many by a global media consortium last year, with the NSO Group malware employed to eavesdrop on journalists, politicians, diplomats, lawyers and human rights activists from the Middle East to Mexico.

The Polish hacks are considered particularly egregious because they occurred not in a repressive autocracy but a European Union member state.

The revelations have rocked Poland, drawing comparisons to the 1970s Watergate scandal in the United States and eliciting calls for an investigation and accountability. Although neither Citizen Lab nor Amnesty International determined who was behind the hacks, the victims all blame Poland’s rightwing ruling party, Law and Justice.

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Law and Justice, acknowledged that the country bought spyware from NSO Group, but he denied that it was being used to target his political opponents. Kaczynski spoke to the weekly Sieci, excerpts of which were published Friday by the wPolityce.pl news portal.

NSO Group does not identify its customers but says it only sells Pegasus to governments to fight terrorism and other serious crimes.

Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki has called the Citizen Lab-AP findings “fake news” and suggested a foreign intelligence service could have done the spying — an idea dismissed by critics who say no other government would have any interest in the three Polish targets.