Phone numbers used by French President Emmanuel Macron and top members of his government are among potential targets of Pegasus spyware supplied to several governments around the world, the NGO that leaked a list of numbers said on Tuesday.
Laurent Richard, head of Forbidden Stories, told LCI television, “We found these numbers but we could not clearly do a technical analysis of Emmanuel Macron’s phone”.
“But it shows there was interest in doing it in any case,” he said.
A spokesman for Macron’s office said, “If this fact is established, it is clearly very serious.”
Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based media nonprofit, and Amnesty International initially had access to the leaked numbers, which they later shared with media organizations including The Washington Post, The Guardian and Le Monde.
Reports said Macron’s phone number was one of 50,000 people believed to have been identified since 2016 as people of interest by the Israeli firm NSO, the developer of Pegasus cyber-surveillance technology.
Activists, journalists and politicians around the world were targeted, sparking fears of widespread privacy and rights abuses.
News outlets with access to the leaks said more details about the people who were compromised would be released in the coming days.
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