Rights group verifies Polish senator was hacked with spyware

Amnesty International says it has independently confirmed that an Israeli company's powerful spyware was used to hack a Polish senator when he was running the opposition’s 2019 parliamentary election campaign

WARSAW, Poland -- Amnesty International said Thursday it has independently confirmed that powerful spyware from the Israeli surveillance software maker NSO Group was used to hack a Polish senator multiple times in 2019 when he was running the opposition’s parliamentary election campaign.

The Associated Press reported last month that Citizen Lab, an internet watchdog group at the University of Toronto, found that the senator, Krzysztof Brejza, and two other Polish government critics were hacked with NSO’s Pegasus spyware.

Dozens of high-profile cases of Pegasus abuse have been uncovered since 2015, many by a global media consortium last year, with the NSO Group malware employed to eavesdrop on journalists, politicians, diplomats, lawyers and human rights activists from the Middle East to Mexico.

The Polish hacks are considered particularly egregious because they occurred not in a repressive autocracy but a European Union member state.