Pegasus Project (investigation)
information leak and investigation revealing alleged cyberweapons deployment against civilians and democratic dissidents
The Pegasus Project is an international investigative journalism initiative that revealed governments' espionage on journalists, opposition politicians, activists, business people and others using the private Pegasus spyware developed by the Israeli technology and cyber-arms company NSO Group. Pegasus is ostensibly marketed for surveillance of "serious crimes and terrorism". In 2020, a target list of 50,000 phone numbers leaked to Forbidden Stories, and an analysis revealed the list contained the numbers of leading opposition politicians, human rights activists, journalists, lawyers and other political dissidents.
A small number of phones that were inspected by Amnesty International's cybersecurity team revealed forensic evidence of the Pegasus spyware, a zero-click Trojan virus developed by NSO Group. This malware provides the attacker full access to the targeted smartphone, its data, images, photographs and conversations as well as camera, microphone and geolocation. This information was passed along to 17 media organisations under "The Pegasus Project" umbrella name. Reports started to be published by member organisations on 18 July 2021, revealing notable non-criminal targets and analysing the practice as a threat to freedom of the press, freedom of speech, dissidents and democratic opposition. On 20 July, 14 heads of state were revealed as former targets of Pegasus malware. Various parties called for further investigation of the abuses and a limitation on trading such repressive malware, among them the newsrooms involved, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Press Institute, and Edward Snowden.
Software
The Pegasus spyware was developed by the Israeli cyberarms company NSO Group.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Pegasus Project (investigation)” as information leak and investigation revealing alleged cyberweapons deployment against civilians and democratic dissidents. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as information leak and investigation revealing alleged cyberweapons deployment against civilians and democratic dissidents. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q107576797. None of the 4 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2020 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “Pegasus Project (investigation)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.