French President Emmanuel Macron has called an urgent national security meeting for Thursday to discuss the Israeli-made Pegasus spyware after reports about its use in France emerged this 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 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 of Macron’s phone numbers and those of many cabinet ministers were on a leaked list of potential Pegasus targets.
The newspapers said they had been unable to confirm 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 close 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 attempt to hack and access the data on my mobile phone.”
The NSO Group has denied that Macron was among the targets of its clients.
We can “specifically come out and say for sure that the president of France, Macron, was not a target”, Chaim Gelfand, chief compliance officer at NSO Group, told Israeli television network i24 on Wednesday.
A source close to Macron played down the risk to him, saying Wednesday that the 43-year-old leader had several phones which were “regularly changed, updated and secured.”
Saudi Arabia, for its part, has dismissed as “baseless” allegations that it used Israeli-supplied Pegasus malware to spy on journalists and human rights activists.
“A Saudi official denied the recent allegations reported in media outlets that an entity in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia used software to monitor phone calls,” the official SPA news agency reported late Wednesday.
“The source added that such allegations are untrue and that KSA’s policies do not condone such practices.”