A day after it emerged that over a dozen Indian activists and lawyers were targeted in a spyware attack through WhatsApp, more names have been added to a growing list pegged at about 41 Indian users. According a report in the Hindustan Times, an unnamed WhatsApp official said that former Union Minister and Rajya Sabha MP Praful Patel and journalist and former Lok Sabha MP Santosh Bharatiya were also among those targeted in the attack. The official told the newspaper that 41 Indian users were contacted for being the target of surveillance, of which 21 were journalists, lawyers and activists. A 32-year-old foreign affairs journalist based out of New Delhi was also a target, the reports says.
Significantly, while WhatsApp had publicly said that it pushed out an update that would patch the issue, the company official said that the spying attempt 'may or may not have been successful.' While Patel told HT that he could not recall being alerted, the WhatsApp official said that it was likely that many of those targeted did not pay attention to the message.
Praful Patel was recently in the news when the Enforcement Directorate allegedly found a link between the senior Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader and Iqbal Mirchi, an aide of wanted criminal mobster Dawood Ibrahim.
It emerged on Thursday that human rights activists and lawyers who represented those arrested in the Bhima Koregaon caste riots case from January 2018 were among those targeted using Israeli spyware called Pegasus. TNM confirmed that this included Nagpur-based lawyer Nihalsing Rathod (who is representing activist Surendra Gadling in the Bhima-Koregaon case) and Maharashtra-based activist Anand Teltumbde. HuffPost and Newslaundry named activists Degree Prasad Chouhan, Bela Bhatia, Rupali Jadhav among those targeted. Scroll added to the list, Chhattisgarh-based activist Shalini Gera, former BBC journalist Shubhranshu Choudhary, Chandigarh-based lawyer Ankit Grewal (also associated with the Bhima Koregaon case), Delhi-based activist Ashish Gupta, activist Seema Azad, environmental activist Vivek Sundara, Delhi University professor Saroj Giri, journalist Sidhant Sibal, columnist Rajeev Sharma, activist Alok Shukla, and activist Ajmal Khan.
On Tuesday, WhatsApp filed a lawsuit against NSO Group, an Israeli tech company, in an American federal court for using its platform for conducting surveillance through a spyware named Pegasus. WhatsApp has alleged that Pegasus could send a malicious code to a victim’s phone and can get installed on the phone’s memory without the victim having to take any action, like clicking on it or opening the message. However, NSO Group has denied any wrongdoing.
Meanwhile, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology has sought a response from WhatsApp on the breach.