After Apple notified Thai activists and human rights supporters in November they had been hacked, Citizen Lab confirms 30+ have been hacked by NSO's Pegasus
The named Thai activists gain verified evidence for legal, medical, and security decisions — the same evidentiary footing the French government obtained when it confirmed Pegasus on three journalists' phones and referred findings to the Paris prosecutor.
Apple's notification system is validated as a detection layer: users it flagged turned out to be genuinely compromised, raising the stakes for every future alert it sends.
Second-order effects
NSO's credibility problem deepens — its own human rights policy was followed within days by an Amnesty-documented hack of an activist (the 2019 policy rollout), and each new confirmed victim pool strengthens the case for export controls and client blacklisting.
Apple is pushed further into the exploit-patch treadmill Citizen Lab later documented, where NSO deployed at least three new zero-click chains against iOS 15 and early iOS 16 in 2022 alone (three new zero-clicks in 2022).
Third-order effects
If the pattern holds — state clients, journalist and activist targets, lab-verified forensics — commercial spyware becomes a regulated category rather than a gray market, with platforms like Apple functioning as de facto counterintelligence for their users.
Attribution work consolidates around a small set of research labs and platform vendors, making Citizen Lab's confirmations a standard input for prosecutors, courts, and sanctions decisions across jurisdictions.
The trend: Commercial spyware is being mapped victim-by-victim by independent forensics labs, dragging vendors like NSO toward regulation and forcing Apple into a permanent patch-and-notify defense.
One year after the first major #Pegasus revelations, another grave misuse uncovered in #Thailand And again, this was the work of investigative journalists and scientists and not the willingness of security apparatus or NSO to come clean. Mistrust is growing by the day... https://…
Pegasus is a monitoring system that can capture audio, pictures, texts, contacts, emails and all messages on a phone, including those that are strongly encrypted... The most effective exploits do not need the phone's owner to click on anything to be installed silently. https://tw…
More than 30 Thai activists and supporters have been hacked with Pegasus spyware, civil groups said late Sunday, in the first countrywide campaign brought to light because Apple warned targeted iPhone users. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Targets included most of the major figures in the 2020 protests, the prominent Thammasat University academic Prajak Kongkirati, and the leader of the well-known pro-constitutional reform organization iLaw. Full @citizenlab report here: https://citizenlab.ca/.... https://twitter.c…
NEW REPORT: Discovery of an extensive espionage campaign in Thailand 🇹🇭 involving the abuse of NSO Group's #Pegasus spyware In collaboration with @iLawFX and @DigitalReachSEA https://citizenlab.ca/...
NSO has always said its spyware is exclusively used to combat terrorism and crime. Left unsaid is that every country has its own definition of “terrorist.” In too many cases, for too many NSO clients, journalists, human rights activists, even just vocal citizens all qualify. http…
New: NSO Group's Pegasus spyware was used against dozens of Thai activists and supporters, investigators say, including a prominent actress and a rapper. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
NEW: @citiznenlab found NSO Group's Pegasus spyware on Thai civil society phones. One of the victims - Panusaya Sithijirawattanakul - a young woman jailed for wearing a crop top that offended Thai king Sounds like the type of “terrorist” that NSO claims its spyware is made for ht…
More than 30 Thai activists and supporters have been hacked with NSO Group's potent Pegasus spyware, civil groups said late Sunday, in the first countrywide campaign brought to light because Apple warned targeted iPhone users. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Vendors like NSO claim to sell their products to combat “terrorism and crime” but again and again the “crime” is being pro-democracy or speaking out. No plausible deniability for any NSO employees any more. They are making a choice by working there. https://twitter.com/...