New Delhi (India), 5th April 2023: According to trade data, an Indian defence agency has been buying equipment from an Israeli spyware company that is being promoted as a possible Pegasus substitute.
The Indian government has neither categorically denied nor acknowledged purchasing the spyware. The data report was examined by The Hindu and they have independently confirmed shipping of equipments to defence agencies.
Inquiries about the equipment’s origin were not answered by the Ministry of Defense. The company in issue is Cognyte Software Ltd, which currently is facing a class action lawsuit against it in the United States.
On Monday U.S. law firm Kessler Topaz Meltzer & Check LLP have pointed to a ‘threat report’ by Facebook who had flagged ‘Cognyte’ as ‘Surveillance for Hire’. The the firm said in a statement, “Cognyte regularly targeted journalists, dissidents, critics of authoritarian regimes, families of opposition, and human rights activists around the world, without their knowledge, and collected intelligence on these people by manipulating them to reveal information and/or by compromising their devices and accounts.”
According to the Forbidden Stories group of journalists, the Pegasus spyware was allegedly used on Indian activists, journalists, and politicians, among others. The Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) stated that it was able to examine trade data confirming that the Intelligence Bureau (IB) imported equipment from the NSO Group in 2017.
An anonymous SID official was cited by The Week magazine in 2019 when they discussed the agency’s use of spyware. They claimed that they had used a malicious WhatsApp link to capture Mudasir Ahmed Khan, the accused mastermind of the Pulwama terror attack that left 40 members of the Central Reserve Police Force dead.
Cognyte and its former parent company Verint Systems Inc. have been providing computer equipment to the Defence Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) Signal Intelligence Directorate (SID) for more than three years.
