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UAE Used Pegasus Spyware to Hack Into Boris Johnson’s No. 10 Downing Street, New Yorker Reports

Gulf state hacking of British targets included at least the phone of an unidentified official at No. 10 Downing Street, according to a New Yorker investigation.

A major investigation into the use of Israeli spyware Pegasus by governments around the globe has thrown up the fact that an official working at 10 Downing Street under Prime Minister Boris Johnson was among those whose phone was compromised. Reporting in The New Yorker, journalist Ronan Farrow says the spyware was used to infect a device connected to the No. 10 network on July 7, 2020. The infiltration was thought to have been ordered by the government of the United Arab Emirates, although British cybersecurity officers, who checked and cleared Johnson’s cellphone, never found out whose device it was. “When we found the No. 10 case, my jaw dropped,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at the Toronto-based Citizen Lab, which has been tracking the use of Pegasus. The Israeli firm NSO has since blocked use of the software against U.S. or U.K. numbers, but Farrow’s report makes clear that it is still being used to target activists and officials around the world.