Exposing Pegasus & Co.

Gathered by Jirair Tutunjian,Toronto, 15 February 2025

Prof. Ronald J. Deibert is the founder and director of the Citizen Lab, a world-renowned digital security research center at the University of Toronto. He is also the bestselling author of Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society and Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of the Internet. He has written many landmark articles and reports on espionage operations that have infiltrated government and NGO computer networks. His team’s exposes of the spyware that attacks journalists and anti-corruption advocates around the world have been featured in major U.S. newspapers.

Prof. Deibert’s latest book is Chasing Shadows (Simon & Schuster). It’s about cyber espionage, subversion, and the global fight for democracy. It details how a small group of people committed to the truth has taken on the world’s most powerful and unscrupulous forces which expose electronic spyware and spy craft.

The major villain of the book is the Israeli Pegasus spyware which Deibert exposes and combats. The second major villain is Cytrox of Macedonia. Armenia is mentioned several times in the book…in negative context.

Page 240: “Working with Thai iLaw and DigitalReach, we forensically confirmed that at least thirty individuals had been infected with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware between October 2020 and November 2021, a period of time coinciding with intense pro-democracy demonstrations in the country. It wouldn’t be long before similar cases would emerge in Mexico, Armenia, Serbia and numerous other countries, thanks to Apple’s alerts.”

Page 285: “As we acquitted forensic data on the functionality of the spyware from his phone, we learned about active installations of Predator worldwide. Out network scanning determined that Armenia, Egypt, Greece, Indonesia, Madagascar, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Serbia were likely government clients of Cytrox. It was another disquieting list of human rights abusers, authoritarian regimes, and illiberal or corrupt governments.”

Page 286: “Meta’s independent investigation corroborated what we found with respect to Cytrox customers in Armenia, Egypt, Greece, Oman and Saudi Arabia.”

Page 322: Prof. Deibert’s group was attending a trade show when journalists from various countries swamped the Canadian booth after learning of the group’s presence. “Over the next several days, our booth was flooded with journalists looking to have their phones checked. It was like a roll call of abuse cases we had investigated over the previous decade, including reporters covering the Gulf and Middle East, Mexico, Indonesia, India, and numerous European countries—Armenia, Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Spain.”

Chasing Shadow provides a front –row seat to a dark underworld of digital espionage, disinformation, and subversion. There, autocrats and dictators peer into their targets’ lives with the mere press of the button. Prof. Deibert and his team are determined to prevent their penetration into the globe’s 8 billion people.