> In May 2026, Kouloglou contacted the Citizen Lab and we conducted a forensic analysis of artifacts from his iPhone. We found with high confidence that his device was successfully infected with Pegasus spyware on or around October 21, 2022, and again on March 6 and 7, 2023.
>> Further validating our finding of targeting, our forensic analysis shows Kouloglou received multiple Apple threat notifications about targeting with mercenary spyware on three occasions: March 2, 2023, August 29, 2023, and April 10, 2024. It is important to note that threat notifications from Apple and other companies are not real-time alerts. They are typically sent to users in batches, often months or more after targeting takes place.
>> Kouloglou reports to us that he did not recall receiving the Apple notifications we observed.
Am I understanding this correctly that Apple sent him notifications that he was being monitored and he ignored them?
That is kind of surprising given he is on the comittee investigating pegasus. I'd assume someone on the comittee would be paying much more attention to this than a normal person.
I wonder what triggered him to suspect he was hacked then. Since presumably something triggered him to have his phone forensically investigated.
Or that Apple could either run searches on the names of affected users against publicly known members of government or have close relationship with governments to flag exactly this.
If he knew he was compromised, and was okay with it for one reason or another (like money or other coercion), this is what his cleanup would look like.
Not saying this is likely. Just another possibility.
It's possible, if the attacker controls the device enough. I don't think a big "you're being targeted" warning is something you don't notice, or forget.
Do they send them via notification infrastructure or email? Personally I almost never check the email associated with my Apple ID so I would miss those. But if all my Apple devices were notifying me and I had a badge in Settings.app, I’d notice.
Then again, you’d think that’s the kinda thing malware developers would spend some time learning to hide from the user.
I wonder how they detect it, is it for known IOCs that they've already found elsewhere, or do they have heuristic detection that flags things that might need further investigation.
Kouloglou is a famous investigative journalist, not you and me. Yes you and I might think we're being scammed, but someone who actually spent a lot of their life getting death threats probably would pay more attention.
Fairly sure that if anybody using a advanced piece of hacking software, they are also going to delete any messages that are related to detection of such hardware.
PC viruses used to do that stuff going back so many years ago. Suppressing any notification under Windows, by disabling the AV software, its notifications, windows notifications related to it.
So it will amaze me that this is not done by any modern espionage software. Especially as the notification methods are known. Given that his device is hacked, that means a lot of avenues are under control of the espionage software. Even mails etc ... So impersonating the end user, to confirm they read a warning, is extreme easy.
I find it rather odd that people are so fixated on the idea if Kouloglou read it or not.
If i was going to write software on this level, that will be used by governments. There is no way, its going to be a nice little program that only extract information.
Its going to have every trick in the book (and outside it), to stay hidden. And it will have payloads to alter its behavior, updates, etc...
Nobody is going to pay you big fat money envelops for software that anybody can write in a afternoon. You want it to be as capable as ever, and you do not want it found!
That seems to be the case, although he claims to have somehow missed them. Overall this is one of those stories that's obviously an outrage, except for the fact that every country on Earth spies on the rest, and quite a few private entities do as well. Still the way the game is played if you get caught you have to act ashamed, and the people catching you get to gloat.
It's silly, but it's a show the public never tires of.
In this case he was investigating misuse of Pegasus spyware specifically, and was targeted with it while doing so. That's obstruction of justice, morally speaking, and would feel very scary, in that it would make you feel that this company might be so powerful that investigating it is personally dangerous.
The US does not spy on Five Eyes government leadership or that of Israel. And perhaps more: in the wake of Snowden, which obliterated many diplomatic relationships the U.S. has with other countries, Obama issued a directive that the U.S. would not monitor heads of state and government of close friends and allies (even outside Five Eyes) unless there was a compelling national security reason. As far as we know that directive has remained in force with each successive administration as well.
They spy on most others though. Germany’s Merkel, successive French presidents etc all had their phones hacked by US there is widely reported news of.
"In December 2010, leaked US diplomatic cables indicated senior New Zealand Defence Ministry officials had been spying for the United States, secretly briefing the United States embassy on Cabinet discussions about the Iraq War."
Nothing has changed post-Snowden, other than that the general public have gone back into a state of apathy on the subject of reigning in their out of control surveillance state.
Absolutely, and there's the same compelling reason for them to spy on the on the US in turn. I can't emphasize this enough, everyone is spying on everyone else. Close alliances give the impression that they don't because they tend to handle scandals in-house, it's for everyone's benefit to do so in most cases. Snowden's disclosure was a very unusual event and put everyone in a position of needing to act shocked, appalled, and put on a big show for the public; sweeping it under the rug was impossible. For all that many here would wish otherwise, Snowden wasn't a watershed though, it was a blip.
Sure. The NSA exists, and it routinely violates the rights of the USA's own citizens, the ones that actually have constitutional rights. The idea that it would suddenly draw the line on foreigners is just absurd.
Yes, the US has an intelligence agency called the NSA, which works with intelligence agencies in the five eyes. There is something called the five eyes agreement that does draw that line.
> In 1951, Mossad and the Central Intelligence Agency agreed not to spy on each other and US and Israeli services cooperated closely since then.
> Nevertheless, there were strong indications afterwards of ongoing Israeli espionage against the United States, confirmed by the 1985 arrest of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, one of the most damaging security leaks in US history.
> Israeli espionage reached a high-profile peak in the mid-1980s, shattering assumptions that allies "do not spy on each other".
> As far as we know that directive has remained in force with each successive administration as well.
People can state a lot, as long as your not caught.
Nothing prevent you from having the UK spy on the Germans, and feeding that intel back. Or Israel, or ... Hey, the US did not spy on a EU ally. Well, not directly and it neatly bypassed any official statements.
They might have simply gone to one of those secret court hearings and have it bypassed with a gag order in place. Officially its not done, unofficially, its been approved.
The whole "as long as you do not tell me your doing it" approach, and the politicians involve maintain deniability (even if they had the wink).
And you do not need to specific target the head off state. Plenty of side routes to still get information on meetings, that involve those heads of states. Even if your not "directly" spying on them.
So no, its a naïve way of thinking. Maybe in 20 years from now we find out, that they did spy on EU leaders. Maybe directly, maybe indirectly ... even with that directive in place. I will be amazed if they did not. Its the US we are talking about.
It's entirely possible an EU country did this; they're only vaguely guessing Belarus or whoever. In most countries, it's a big deal if the spies are caught spying on the domestic government.
> quite a few private entities do as well.
It's a risky game, doing that. You don't get any of the professional courtesies, and you're not usually eligible for the prisoner exchanges.
> we note an overlap between the first infection and a previously identified Pegasus campaign targeting Russian and Belarusian-speaking exiled journalists and activists in Europe, suggesting a Pegasus customer with authorization to spy in multiple European countries is responsible.
Who has "authorization to spy in multiple European countries"?
In this older article [0] about one of the mentioned russian exiles case it is mentioned that estonia and netherlands have used pegasus outside their borders, but there could be also others with such license
> the Netherlands’ General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) and an unnamed Estonian government agency, appear to use Pegasus extensively outside their borders, including within multiple European countries
However if the link between the russian exiles cases and kouloglou checks (through use of same mode of attack), a country like estonia sounds more likely. However, it can always be that an agency with access to pegasus uses it collaborating with/on behalf of an agency without.
They’ll quickly make up some law forcing someone to do something, or throw some hefty fine at someone, and it’ll be sorted pronto. Someone’s gotta be held responsible.
One interesting thing here, is they imply that both confidential personal medical information and confidential gov docs might have been compromised via the same phone.
Does EU parliment not have a policy of seperating work and personal devices?
Having a policy and what happens in the real world are most of the time very different things (Understandably, as the line between work and personal time is often blurry).
From what I understood, he took his compromised work phone to the hospital, and the concern is that it may have recorded conversations that contained personal medical information.
Around that time a lot of politicians in Greece had their phones hacked by Pegasus. It's an ongoing scandal in Greece that never got fully resolved, although all evidence indicate that it was an operation orchestrated by the office of the prime minister in coordination with the local intelligence service. So I wouldn't call that an attack against the European parliament.
Just for context, some european contries have been abusing spyware such as Pegasus so much Israeli firms have cut ties with them, one such example below with Italy. Others have pointed out Greece and Poland. It's quite laughable that a member of the EU parliament would be subject to the same kind of spying activities innocent journalists, activists and possibly normal people are, all of that by the member states of the union, directly contributing to the Israeli companies developing and spreading malware.
Cutting ties after there has been an outcry is damage controll. I would assume that the product is still available under another sub vendor to the same people.
Of course it's damage control. The post just tries to paint the europeans as incompetent to hold the power. The company making spyware is somehow wise, righteous and saintly.
Euro Parliament/Euro Commission are comically open to espionage. French/Belgian counterintelligence are not allowed to do much, and there is little in terms of EU counterintelligence.
How is it that any NSO employee is still able to travel outside Israel without getting arrested? Seems like they're involved in criminal conspiracies in like half the countries in the world.
Not quite surprising. The more important question is: how much are lobbyists paid to sell out data of EU citizens to US corporations here? Will they prevail?
if you believe that the parent comment is propaganda, would you care to share why exactly you believe that the average european citizen benefits from mass surveillance funnelled through american channels?
the average person isnt taught to handle cognitive dissonance, maybe thats why lying by omission is such an effective propaganda technique. thank you for clarifying your perspective
It feels like they've been paid to sell out the users themselves, not just the data. It's weird that EU is so dependant on US tech when it comes to media platforms... While there are alternatives out there. In a lot of related areas in tech, it feels like suppression.
"PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies.
The documents identified several technology companies as participants in the PRISM program, including Microsoft in 2007, Yahoo! in 2008, Google in 2009, Facebook in 2009, Paltalk in 2009, YouTube in 2010, AOL in 2011, Skype in 2011 and Apple in 2012
"
This is where I disagree as a software engineer who has seen EU products built and not adopted... I've also built products myself which were fully functioning and scalable but not widely adopted. Building is not the bottleneck.
It feels like there is a limit on distribution. Just getting people to try a product is incredibly hard. Very hard to reach them and ads feel like they're only served to bots.
Network effects are real. It is hard to convince people to move over to your platform if the selling argument is 'not quite there yet, but we got you covered on the minilib front, plus it's less usable because of our weird interpretation of our own data protection laws'.
Yes and my perspective is that GDPR has harmed EU startups and helped US companies by virtue of them being incumbents and having the resources to dedicate to compliance. Probably can't be fixed as easily now because of corporate culture around standards like SOC2 and ISO27001... Which I think are more harmful to security than helpful as they create complacency and hinder progress by creating barriers.
There's a decision to be made whether corporations should be allowed to do anything they want or not. The countries that choose to let them do what they want, will obviously give them an advantage over the countries that don't.
You and I, however, are not corporations, so maybe it's in our best interest if they actually aren't allowed to do whatever they want.
_probably_ is doing the heavy lifting here
>> Kouloglou reports to us that he did not recall receiving the Apple notifications we observed.
Am I understanding this correctly that Apple sent him notifications that he was being monitored and he ignored them?
I wonder what triggered him to suspect he was hacked then. Since presumably something triggered him to have his phone forensically investigated.
Not saying this is likely. Just another possibility.
Then again, you’d think that’s the kinda thing malware developers would spend some time learning to hide from the user.
>A Threat Notification is displayed at the top of the page after the user signs into account.apple.com.
>Apple sends an email and iMessage notification to the email addresses and phone numbers associated with the user’s Apple Account.
You can see what it looks like in https://reddit.com/r/iphone/comments/1c10jai/i_have_received...
I wonder how they detect it, is it for known IOCs that they've already found elsewhere, or do they have heuristic detection that flags things that might need further investigation.
It isn’t hard to accidentally dismiss one then wonder what it was. Why there isn’t there an interface for looking back?
Edit: below it says there are emails and notices on web login.
That or he didn't notice or could have assumed the notice itself was one of many phishing attempts against large orgs.
If I saw a notification that my account was compromised by Pegasus I'd personally assume phishing.
PC viruses used to do that stuff going back so many years ago. Suppressing any notification under Windows, by disabling the AV software, its notifications, windows notifications related to it.
So it will amaze me that this is not done by any modern espionage software. Especially as the notification methods are known. Given that his device is hacked, that means a lot of avenues are under control of the espionage software. Even mails etc ... So impersonating the end user, to confirm they read a warning, is extreme easy.
I find it rather odd that people are so fixated on the idea if Kouloglou read it or not.
Its going to have every trick in the book (and outside it), to stay hidden. And it will have payloads to alter its behavior, updates, etc...
Nobody is going to pay you big fat money envelops for software that anybody can write in a afternoon. You want it to be as capable as ever, and you do not want it found!
It's silly, but it's a show the public never tires of.
They spy on most others though. Germany’s Merkel, successive French presidents etc all had their phones hacked by US there is widely reported news of.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_espionage_in_Aus...
"In December 2010, leaked US diplomatic cables indicated senior New Zealand Defence Ministry officials had been spying for the United States, secretly briefing the United States embassy on Cabinet discussions about the Iraq War."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_espionage_in_New_Zeala...
Doubt.
> unless there was a compelling national security reason
There always is.
Can you substantiate your doubt with even one piece of hard evidence?
Believe such nonsense at your own peril.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_espionage_in_the_Unite...
> In 1951, Mossad and the Central Intelligence Agency agreed not to spy on each other and US and Israeli services cooperated closely since then.
> Nevertheless, there were strong indications afterwards of ongoing Israeli espionage against the United States, confirmed by the 1985 arrest of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, one of the most damaging security leaks in US history.
> Israeli espionage reached a high-profile peak in the mid-1980s, shattering assumptions that allies "do not spy on each other".
People can state a lot, as long as your not caught.
Nothing prevent you from having the UK spy on the Germans, and feeding that intel back. Or Israel, or ... Hey, the US did not spy on a EU ally. Well, not directly and it neatly bypassed any official statements.
They might have simply gone to one of those secret court hearings and have it bypassed with a gag order in place. Officially its not done, unofficially, its been approved.
The whole "as long as you do not tell me your doing it" approach, and the politicians involve maintain deniability (even if they had the wink).
And you do not need to specific target the head off state. Plenty of side routes to still get information on meetings, that involve those heads of states. Even if your not "directly" spying on them.
So no, its a naïve way of thinking. Maybe in 20 years from now we find out, that they did spy on EU leaders. Maybe directly, maybe indirectly ... even with that directive in place. I will be amazed if they did not. Its the US we are talking about.
It's entirely possible an EU country did this; they're only vaguely guessing Belarus or whoever. In most countries, it's a big deal if the spies are caught spying on the domestic government.
> quite a few private entities do as well.
It's a risky game, doing that. You don't get any of the professional courtesies, and you're not usually eligible for the prisoner exchanges.
Who has "authorization to spy in multiple European countries"?
In this older article [0] about one of the mentioned russian exiles case it is mentioned that estonia and netherlands have used pegasus outside their borders, but there could be also others with such license
> the Netherlands’ General Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) and an unnamed Estonian government agency, appear to use Pegasus extensively outside their borders, including within multiple European countries
However if the link between the russian exiles cases and kouloglou checks (through use of same mode of attack), a country like estonia sounds more likely. However, it can always be that an agency with access to pegasus uses it collaborating with/on behalf of an agency without.
[0] https://www.accessnow.org/publication/hacking-meduza-pegasus...
Does EU parliment not have a policy of seperating work and personal devices?
The more important you are the more you may think that exceptions can be made for you.
He didn’t have medical information on the phone.
https://notesfrompoland.com/2026/02/26/poland-charges-former...
Everything looks like a nail if you have a hammer.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cvgmzdjw24yo
There is enough money to go around for certain.
The documents identified several technology companies as participants in the PRISM program, including Microsoft in 2007, Yahoo! in 2008, Google in 2009, Facebook in 2009, Paltalk in 2009, YouTube in 2010, AOL in 2011, Skype in 2011 and Apple in 2012 "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
It feels like there is a limit on distribution. Just getting people to try a product is incredibly hard. Very hard to reach them and ads feel like they're only served to bots.
You and I, however, are not corporations, so maybe it's in our best interest if they actually aren't allowed to do whatever they want.