Praful, 40 others among WhatsApp users snooped on

NEWDELHI: Several human rights activists, lawyers and journalists in India came forward on Thursday to say that they had been identified as targets of a phone hack aimed at snooping on them, a day after popular messaging service WhatsApp went public with allegations against an Israeli firm for having misused its platform to aid spying on around 1,400 people spread across the world.

The people targeted in India include former Union minister Praful Patel and former Lok Sabha MP Santosh Bharatiya, a WhatsApp official said, and added that the company had identified 41 people in all.

Of these, 21 were journalists, lawyers and activists, this person said, asking not to be named.

The people, whose WhatsApp accounts are safe for now, were contacted either by Torontobased research group Citizen Lab or WhatsApp to be informed of the spying, which may or may not have been successful.

“They told me that I was one of 1,400 people [globally] who was the target of an attempted spying attack,” said a 32-year old diplomatic correspondent in New Delhi, who received a call from Citizen Lab last month.

Patel, who was alerted by a message sent out by WhatsApp, said he did not remember being approached.

“It’s possible that many did not pay heed to the message,” the WhatsApp official quoted above said, reiterating that at least one of Patel’s phones was targeted by the Israeli software.

The software in question is developed by NSO Group and is known mostly as Pegasus.