Investigative Review of NSO Group

The Entity List Failure: A Green Light in Amman

The United States Department of Commerce added NSO Group to its Entity List in November 2021. This designation, theoretically a death sentence for foreign technology firms dependent on American components, was intended to the infrastructure of mercenary spyware. Yet, in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, a “Major Non-NATO Ally,” the blacklisting served not as a deterrent, as a starting gun for a renewed and more aggressive surveillance offensive. Between 2020 and late 2023, while NSO Group supposedly fought for its corporate survival, its flagship product, Pegasus, was busy the private lives of Jordan’s most prominent civil society actors. The data is irrefutable: the US blacklist did not stop the infections; it drove them into the shadows where they proliferated with terrifying efficiency.

A forensic investigation released in February 2024 by Access and the Citizen Lab revealed the of this impunity. The investigation confirmed that at least 35 individuals in Jordan were targeted or infected with Pegasus. Crucially, a significant cluster of these infections occurred after the US government formally NSO Group as a national security threat. The timeline exposes a direct contradiction between American foreign policy rhetoric and the operational reality on the ground in Amman. While Washington issued press releases condemning the “proliferation of commercial spyware,” Jordanian intelligence services, recipients of over $1. 45 billion in annual US aid, were actively deploying that very spyware against journalists, lawyers, and human rights defenders.

Targeting the Watchdogs: Human Rights Watch and Citizen Journalists

The selection of in Jordan demonstrates a calculated effort to blind the international community to internal repression. Among the most egregious cases was the hacking of Human Rights Watch (HRW) staff. Adam Coogle, a US citizen and HRW’s deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, and Hiba Zayadin, a senior researcher, were both targeted. Coogle’s personal mobile device was infected on October 2, 2022, nearly a year after the US blacklist went into effect. The infection occurred just two weeks after HRW published a report documenting the systematic persecution of peaceful dissenters in Jordan. The correlation is undeniable: the spyware was used not for counter-terrorism, as a tool of immediate political retaliation against a US-based organization.

The targeting of Daoud Kuttab, an award-winning Palestinian-American journalist, further illustrates the brazen nature of this campaign. Kuttab was hacked with Pegasus three separate times between February 2022 and September 2023. During this period, he was also arrested at Queen Alia International Airport and detained under the country’s draconian cybercrime statutes. The surveillance of Kuttab, a US citizen, by a US-funded ally using Israeli military-grade technology, represents a complete collapse of the protective method the Entity List was supposed to establish. It sends a clear message to American citizens abroad: your passport offers no protection against the digital weapons your tax dollars indirectly subsidize.

Zero-Click Warfare: The Technical Escalation

The 2023 surge in Jordan was characterized by a shift toward “zero-click” exploits, marking a serious escalation in technical sophistication. In previous years, Pegasus operators frequently relied on social engineering, sending malicious links via SMS or WhatsApp that required the victim to take action. The post-blacklist wave utilized exploits such as “BLASTPASS,” “PWNYOURHOME,” and “FINDMYPWN.” These attack vectors allowed the spyware to infiltrate devices without any interaction from the user. Victims like Coogle and Kuttab did not click suspicious links; they simply existed. The spyware silently compromised their devices, granting operators full access to microphones, cameras, encrypted messages, and location data.

This technical shift neutralizes the standard digital security training provided to journalists and activists. Advising to “avoid suspicious links” is useless against a weapon that exploits vulnerabilities in the core architecture of iOS image processing or HomeKit functionality. The deployment of BLASTPASS in Jordan during 2023 indicates that NSO Group continued to provide its clients with the most advanced, premium capabilities available, even while under US sanctions. The “maintenance” of these systems requires constant updates and server communication, proving that the business relationship between NSO and the Jordanian apparatus remained active, strong, and fully supported throughout the blacklisting period.

The Cybercrime Law of 2023: Surveillance as a Prelude to Silence

The surge in Pegasus infections cannot be viewed in isolation; it was the intelligence-gathering phase of a broader legislative crackdown. In August 2023, the Jordanian government passed a new Cybercrime Law, a piece of legislation widely condemned by international rights groups. The law criminalizes vague offenses such as “character assassination,” “provoking strife,” and “undermining national unity” online. The forensic data shows that the spike in Pegasus targeting occurred in the months leading up to and immediately following the passage of this law. Spyware was used to map the networks of dissent, identify the organizers of opposition, and gather the private communications necessary to build legal cases under the new statutes.

Journalists were the primary victims of this preparatory surveillance. Of the 35 confirmed, 16 were journalists or media workers. This includes Rana Sabbagh and Lara Dihmis from the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). Sabbagh, a veteran investigative editor, had her phone infected multiple times. The intent was to compromise the confidentiality of sources, killing investigative journalism in the Kingdom. By infecting the editors and reporters who might scrutinize the Cybercrime Law or the government’s economic policies, the Jordanian security services ensured that the “fourth estate” was transparent to the state. The chilling effect is absolute; sources know that contacting a journalist in Jordan is a liability, as the journalist’s phone is likely a listening device for the General Intelligence Directorate (GID).

The US Visa Ban: A Toothless Response

In February 2024, ostensibly in response to the rampant misuse of spyware by allies like Jordan, the US State Department announced a new policy imposing visa restrictions on individuals involved in the misuse of commercial spyware. This policy was marketed as a method to hold foreign officials accountable. Yet, the continued targeting of civil society in Jordan exposes the hollowness of this measure. Visa restrictions are a bureaucratic inconvenience, not a strategic deterrent. For a Jordanian intelligence officer tasked with preserving regime stability, the threat of losing a tourist visa to the United States pales in comparison to the perceived need of neutralizing internal dissent.

The financial use the US holds over Jordan, $1. 45 billion in annual assistance, remains untouched. The US government has not conditioned its military or economic aid on the cessation of spyware abuse. This financial pipeline subsidizes the surveillance state. Money is fungible; when the US covers the cost of F-16 maintenance and border security, it frees up Jordanian domestic budget resources to purchase NSO Group contracts. The refusal of the Biden administration to use this aid renders the Entity List and visa bans performative. The message received in Amman is that human rights concerns are rhetorical, while security cooperation is transactional and unconditional.

The Recidivism of the State

The case of Hala Ahed, a human rights lawyer defending the Jordan Teachers’ Syndicate and women’s rights activists, exemplifies the recidivist nature of this surveillance. Ahed was identified as a Pegasus victim in 2021. Following the public exposure of her hacking, one might expect the state to retreat. Instead, forensic analysis confirmed she was targeted again in 2023. This pattern of re-targeting demonstrates that exposure carries no penalty for the aggressor. The Jordanian authorities learned that they could get caught, weather a brief news pattern of condemnation, and then resume operations with more advanced tools. The absence of consequences has normalized the use of military-grade cyberweapons against lawyers, stripping the legal profession of its privileged confidentiality.

The persistence of these attacks also implicates the failure of NSO Group’s internal compliance method. The company repeatedly claims that it investigates allegations of misuse and terminates contracts with offending clients. The re-targeting of Hala Ahed and the fresh infections of HRW staff in 2023 prove these claims are false. If NSO’s compliance department existed in any meaningful capacity, the contract with Jordan would have been severed after the 2021. Instead, the contract appears to have been renewed and upgraded to include zero-click capabilities. NSO Group did not just sell a product; they maintained a service that actively facilitated the persecution of civil society in direct violation of the stated foreign policy interests of the United States.

Conclusion of the Jordanian Surge

The 2023 surge in Pegasus infections in Jordan stands as a definitive case study in the limitations of Western export controls. The US Entity List failed to sever the supply chain. The visa bans failed to deter the operators. The internal compliance of the vendor was non-existent. What remains is a surveillance ecosystem where a US-funded ally uses Israeli technology to hack US citizens and American NGOs with total impunity. The “Blastpass” exploits found on the phones of Amman’s activists are digital artifacts of this failure, proving that in the absence of genuine diplomatic pressure, the market for repression always find a way to function.

The Mechanics of PWNYOURHOME

Discovered by Citizen Lab in early 2023, PWNYOURHOME represented a method to device compromise, targeting the obscure intersection of Apple’s HomeKit framework and its iMessage protocol. Unlike previous “one-click” attacks that relied on social engineering to trick victims into activating a malicious link, PWNYOURHOME operated as a two-step zero-click exploit. The attack sequence began with the `homed` process (Home Daemon), a background system responsible for managing connected home devices. NSO Group’s engineers identified a vulnerability in how this daemon processed incoming invitations or status updates. By sending a specifically crafted message to the target’s HomeKit identifier, the attacker could trigger a crash or memory corruption within the `homed` process. This initial breach did not grant full device control served as a beachhead. Once the HomeKit daemon was compromised, the exploit pivoted to iMessage. The corrupted `homed` process was used to manipulate the `Messages` framework, allowing the spyware to launch a secondary payload. This two-step lateral movement, from a peripheral smart-home process into the core communications infrastructure, demonstrated a deep understanding of iOS internal architecture. Crucially, PWNYOURHOME was deployed during a period when Apple was actively rolling out “Lockdown Mode,” a specialized security setting designed to reduce the attack surface for high-risk users. Forensic evidence suggests that early versions of PWNYOURHOME triggered notifications on devices where Lockdown Mode was enabled, alerting victims to the intrusion attempt. This forced NSO Group to adapt rapidly. Later iterations of the exploit attempted to suppress these system notifications, though the “cat-and-mouse” showed that the window of invisibility for NSO’s tools was narrowing, necessitating frequent and complex code updates.

BLASTPASS: The Wallet Vector

If PWNYOURHOME was a probe into peripheral frameworks, **BLASTPASS** was a direct assault on the core of the iOS ecosystem. Identified in September 2023, this exploit chain is considered one of the most potent weapons in NSO Group’s history. It utilized a vulnerability in the `PassKit` framework, the system underlying Apple Wallet and Apple Pay. The technical brilliance of BLASTPASS lay in its delivery method. Attackers sent a malicious attachment via iMessage that appeared to the system as a legitimate `. pkpass` file, a format used for digital boarding passes, loyalty cards, or event tickets. Because iOS is designed to render these passes automatically to display previews to the user, the malicious code executed immediately upon receipt, without the user ever opening the message or the Wallet app. The exploit relied on two specific Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs): 1. **CVE-2023-41064:** A buffer overflow vulnerability in the `ImageIO` framework. The malicious `. pkpass` file contained a crafted image that, when processed by the system’s image rendering library, caused the device to write data outside the allocated memory buffer. This overflow allowed the attacker to overwrite adjacent memory with arbitrary code. 2. **CVE-2023-41061:** A validation problem in the `Wallet` framework itself, which failed to properly sanitize the incoming pass data, permitting the execution of the payload delivered via the image overflow. This chain was particularly dangerous because it affected fully patched iPhones running iOS 16. 6, the latest version available at the time. It bypassed the operating system’s “BlastDoor” sandbox, a security feature explicitly built to filter malicious data in iMessage, proving that NSO Group had successfully reverse-engineered Apple’s specific defenses against them.

Active Deployment in Jordan

The theoretical lethality of these exploits was confirmed by their aggressive deployment in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. A joint investigation by Access and Citizen Lab, published in early 2024, revealed that at least 35 individuals in Jordan were targeted with Pegasus during this period. The victims included human rights lawyers, independent journalists, and political activists. Forensic analysis of the victims’ devices provided the “smoking gun” linking the technical escalation to specific. Traces of both PWNYOURHOME and BLASTPASS were recovered from the logs of Jordanian civil society members. In several instances, the infection attempts were relentless. When one exploit failed, frequently due to an iOS update or the target enabling Lockdown Mode, the operators would switch to the alternative chain or revert to social engineering, posing as journalists to deliver malicious links. This surge in Jordan highlights a serious aspect of the post-blacklist: the “service” nature of NSO’s business model. The development of BLASTPASS was not a capital investment for a single client a platform upgrade available to the company’s remaining customer base. Jordan, a close ally of the West yet a prolific user of surveillance tech, became a primary theater for these new weapons. The widespread infection of Jordanian civil society demonstrates that the US blacklisting did not degrade the *quality* of the weaponry supplied to clients; rather, it incentivized the creation of tools that were harder to detect and harder to block.

The Polish

While Jordan served as the active testing ground for BLASTPASS and PWNYOURHOME, the situation in Poland offered a clear counter-narrative, defined not by new infections by the forensic unearthing of past abuses. Following the political upheaval and the subsequent investigation into the Law and Justice (PiS) party’s use of Pegasus, Poland’s access to NSO’s infrastructure was reportedly curtailed. There is no public forensic evidence linking the Polish security services to the deployment of BLASTPASS or PWNYOURHOME in 2023 or 2024. Instead, the Polish narrative focuses on the *precursors* to these exploits. The “ForcedEntry” exploits used against Polish like Senator Krzysztof Brejza in 2019 and 2020 laid the foundational knowledge that NSO engineers later refined into the 2023 zero-click chains. The contrast is instructive: In Poland, the exposure of Pegasus usage led to a parliamentary inquiry, the arrest of former security officials, and a cessation of the specific “Pegasus” program. In Jordan, where no such political accountability method triggered a halt, the state apparatus upgraded to BLASTPASS. This illustrates that technical countermeasures (like Apple’s updates) are insufficient without political. As long as a client state like Jordan is to pay and remains outside the immediate scope of an export ban enforcement, NSO Group continues to supply them with exploits that outpace the defenses of the average iPhone.

The Failure of “BlastDoor”

The success of BLASTPASS specifically highlighted the limitations of Apple’s “BlastDoor” service. Introduced in iOS 14, BlastDoor was intended to parse untrusted data in a secure, sandboxed environment, theoretically neutralizing exploits before they could touch the operating system’s core. BLASTPASS circumvented this by leveraging `PassKit`, a framework that interacts with the system differently than standard text or image messages. By encapsulating the malicious logic within a digital wallet pass, NSO Group found a side channel that bypassed the heaviest fortifications of the iMessage pipeline. This required not just vulnerability research a detailed mapping of iOS inter-process communication. The exploit proved that NSO’s research team possessed an understanding of iOS internals that rivaled, and in specific vectors exceeded, that of Apple’s own defensive teams. The discovery of BLASTPASS on the device of a Washington D. C.-based civil society employee further emphasized the brazen nature of this deployment. even with the US government’s explicit sanctions, the technology was being used to target individuals working within the US capital’s orbit, utilizing an exploit chain that rendered the most secure consumer device on the market. This incident forced Apple to problem emergency patches (iOS 16. 6. 1) and publicly credit Citizen Lab, acknowledging that the threat was active and serious.

for Civil Society

The deployment of PWNYOURHOME and BLASTPASS signals a dangerous reality for civil society in regions like Jordan. The barrier to entry for surveillance has been lowered to zero. A target does not need to make a mistake; they do not need to click a link, answer a call, or download a file. The mere possession of a phone connected to a cellular network constitutes a vulnerability. For Jordanian activists, this meant that standard operational security training—”don’t click suspicious links”—was rendered obsolete. The only defense identified against BLASTPASS was Apple’s Lockdown Mode, which disables certain features like complex image rendering in iMessage and blocks incoming invitations in HomeKit. yet, adoption of Lockdown Mode remains low among the general population and even among at-risk groups due to the usability friction it introduces. The persistence of these attacks in Jordan, occurring years after the initial exposure of Pegasus and the US blacklisting, confirms that the market for zero-click exploits is inelastic. Demand from authoritarian or semi-authoritarian states drives supply, and NSO Group’s ability to around silicon-level defenses ensures that this demand is met. The transition from the “ForcedEntry” era to the “BLASTPASS” era represents a technical escalation that regulatory measures have failed to arrest.

The “MANSAF” and “BLACKIRIS” Operators: Attribution to Jordanian Intelligence Agencies

The forensic architecture of NSO Group’s operations in Jordan is defined by two distinct Pegasus operators, by Citizen Lab as MANSAF and BLACKIRIS. These operators do not represent rogue elements or actors; the technical evidence, target selection, and operational timelines indicate they are instrumentalities of the Jordanian state, specifically the General Intelligence Directorate (GID). Their activities demonstrate a sustained, state-sponsored campaign to civil society through digital espionage, continuing unabated long after the United States Department of Commerce blacklisted NSO Group in November 2021.

Operational Profiles: MANSAF and BLACKIRIS

Citizen Lab identified MANSAF as the elder of the two operators, active since at least December 2018. While its primary focus is domestic surveillance within Jordan, MANSAF’s footprint extends regionally, with limited operations detected in Iraq, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia. This operational scope aligns with the GID’s mandate, which encompasses both internal security and regional intelligence gathering. The operator’s longevity suggests it was the initial vector for Pegasus deployment in the Kingdom, established well before the global scrutiny of Project Pegasus intensified.

BLACKIRIS, by contrast, appears to be a more specialized and aggressive entity. Active since at least December 2020, its targeting is almost exclusively domestic. The name itself, a reference to Jordan’s national flower, mirrors the operator’s hyper-localized focus. BLACKIRIS emerged during a period of intensifying internal repression, coinciding with the crackdown on the Teachers’ Syndicate and the dissolution of its board. The timing suggests that BLACKIRIS was stood up specifically to handle the surge in domestic surveillance requirements as the state moved to crush internal dissent.

Attribution to the General Intelligence Directorate (GID)

The attribution of these operators to the Jordanian government is supported by a convergence of technical and circumstantial evidence. Citizen Lab’s analysis of the infrastructure used by MANSAF and BLACKIRIS revealed a cluster of domain names and servers meticulously curated with Jordanian themes, designed to deceive local. also, the targeting profile is devoid of legitimate counter-terrorism or criminal investigation justifications. Instead, the victims are exclusively critics of the monarchy, human rights lawyers, anti-corruption activists, and journalists investigating state malfeasance.

In August 2020, Haaretz reported that NSO Group used the code name “Jaguar” to refer to its client in Jordan. Subsequent investigations by Axios in 2021 confirmed that negotiations between NSO Group and Jordanian authorities had resulted in a signed contract. The GID, known locally as the Mukhabarat, is the only entity in Jordan with the budget, political mandate, and operational capability to sustain such a sophisticated cyber-espionage program. The selected by MANSAF and BLACKIRIS map perfectly onto the GID’s known list of “persons of interest,” confirming that these operators are the digital arm of the state’s security apparatus.

The Targeting Campaign: A Who’s Who of Civil Society

The list of victims targeted by MANSAF and BLACKIRIS reads as a roll call of Jordan’s most prominent civil society figures. Hala Ahed Deeb, a human rights lawyer defending the dissolved Teachers’ Syndicate and women’s rights activists, was targeted multiple times. Her device showed evidence of infection in March 2021, and she was targeted again in February 2023. The relentless nature of these attacks, over years, demonstrates that the GID views her legal advocacy as a threat to state stability.

Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian-American journalist and director-general of the Community Media Network, was hacked at least three times between February 2022 and September 2023. Kuttab’s targeting is particularly egregious given his status as a journalist and the content of his work, which frequently addresses press freedom and political reform. The GID’s interest in Kuttab intensified after he published reports serious of the King’s property holdings, further cementing the link between his journalism and the state’s retaliatory surveillance.

The operators also targeted international observers. Adam Coogle, a deputy director at Human Rights Watch (HRW), and Hiba Zayadin, a senior researcher at HRW, were targeted in late 2022 and 2023. Coogle’s device was infected on October 2, 2022, exactly two weeks after HRW published a report documenting the government’s persecution of political dissent. This timing is not coincidental; it is a clear punitive measure intended to intimidate international organizations monitoring Jordan’s human rights record.

Technical Escalation and Post-Blacklist Impunity

Crucially, the activity of MANSAF and BLACKIRIS did not cease when NSO Group was placed on the US Entity List. On the contrary, the attacks escalated in technical sophistication. While early infections relied on “one-click” SMS attacks, sending malicious links disguised as news updates or package notifications, later operations utilized “zero-click” exploits. The infection of Adam Coogle’s iPhone involved a zero-click exploit targeting a vulnerability in Apple’s HomeKit, requiring no interaction from the victim. This shift indicates that NSO Group continued to provide its Jordanian clients with its most advanced cyber-weapons well into 2023, in direct defiance of US sanctions.

The persistence of these operators through September 2023 confirms that the Jordanian government faced no material consequences for its abuse of the spyware. even with NSO Group’s claims of “investigating misuse” and “terminating contracts,” MANSAF and BLACKIRIS remained fully operational, upgrading their arsenal and expanding their target list. The GID’s ability to deploy military-grade spyware against lawyers and journalists, with the tacit support of an Israeli vendor and the indifference of the international community, exposes the hollowness of the current regulatory framework governing the surveillance industry.

The Red Line Crossed: Targeting Global NGO Leadership

The deployment of Pegasus spyware against the leadership of Human Rights Watch (HRW) represents a severe escalation in the normalization of state-sponsored cyber-espionage. While the surveillance of local activists is a documented staple of authoritarian control, the targeting of senior directors at a US-based international organization signals a collapse of deterrence. In October 2022, nearly a year after the Biden administration placed NSO Group on the Entity List for acting contrary to US foreign policy interests, the personal iPhone of Adam Coogle, HRW’s Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa, was successfully infected. This attack occurred within the sovereign borders of Jordan, a major recipient of US aid, and targeted a device used to document the very abuses the US government claims to oppose.

The infection of Coogle’s device was not an anomaly part of a systematic campaign to blind the region’s primary human rights watchdog. Forensic analysis conducted by HRW’s information security team, and peer-reviewed by Amnesty International’s Security Lab, confirmed that Coogle’s phone was compromised on October 2, 2022. The attack used a sophisticated zero-click exploit targeting the HomeKit functionality in iOS, allowing the operator to gain full control over the device without the victim interacting with a link or file. This technical precision indicates that the operator, identified by Citizen Lab as the Jordan-focused actor “MANSAF,” possessed access to NSO Group’s most advanced and expensive inventory long after the company claimed to have reformed its compliance standards.

Timeline of Impunity: The Coogle Infection

The timing of the attack on Adam Coogle reveals a direct correlation between HRW’s investigative output and the deployment of cyber-weapons. On September 18, 2022, HRW published a detailed report titled “Jordan: Government Crushes Civic Space,” which detailed the kingdom’s use of vague laws to criminalize peaceful dissent and the harassment of activists. Exactly two weeks later, on October 2, Coogle’s phone was breached. This sequence suggests that the Jordanian security apparatus views the documentation of human rights abuses as a hostile act warranting military-grade counter-intelligence measures. The spyware remained active on Coogle’s device for approximately 24 hours, a window sufficient to exfiltrate gigabytes of sensitive data, including witness testimony, source identities, and internal strategy documents.

The breach of Coogle’s device forces a re-evaluation of the risk profile for international NGO staff. Historically, foreign nationals and senior directors enjoyed a degree of immunity from the aggressive digital policing applied to local dissidents. The Coogle case shatters this assumption. By targeting a high-profile director, the operator demonstrated a willingness to risk diplomatic friction to secure intelligence on HRW’s operations. The infection was only discovered after Apple sent a threat notification to Coogle in March 2023, warning that state-sponsored attackers were targeting his device. This delay between infection and detection, nearly five months, granted the operators a significant strategic advantage, leaving HRW’s network exposed during a serious period of advocacy.

Lama Fakih and the Targeting of US Citizens

The audacity of the campaign is further illuminated by the relentless targeting of Lama Fakih, HRW’s Director for the Middle East and North Africa and a US-Lebanese dual citizen. Between April and August 2021, Fakih’s devices were infected at least five times. These attacks utilized the “Megalodon” and “FORCEDENTRY” exploits, which leveraged vulnerabilities in iMessage to bypass iOS security sandboxes. At the time of the infections, Fakih was overseeing emergency response efforts in Lebanon following the catastrophic Beirut port explosion, an investigation that implicated high-level political negligence.

Fakih’s status as a US citizen places her targeting in direct conflict with the stated rationale of the US Commerce Department’s blacklisting of NSO Group. The Biden administration justified the designation by citing NSO’s role in enabling “transnational repression.” Yet, the continued use of Pegasus against a US citizen leading a major American NGO demonstrates that the blacklist has failed to curb the operational behavior of NSO’s clients. NSO Group’s standard defense, that it does not know who its clients target, collapses under the weight of these repeated infections. A client targeting the regional director of Human Rights Watch five times over four months creates a pattern of abuse that any functional compliance algorithm should flag immediately. The failure to suspend the client after the 2021 attacks on Fakih directly enabled the 2022 attack on Coogle.

Persistence of the Campaign: The 2023 Threat

The campaign against HRW did not cease following the public exposure of the Fakih and Coogle hacks. In August 2023, both Adam Coogle and Hiba Zayadin, a senior researcher for Jordan and Syria, received fresh threat notifications from Apple. These alerts indicated that state-sponsored attackers were once again attempting to compromise their devices. Zayadin, who works closely with Coogle in Amman, has been instrumental in documenting the crackdown on the Teachers’ Syndicate and the arrest of political activists. The persistence of these attempts, occurring nearly two years after the US blacklisting of NSO, confirms that the Jordanian operators face no internal or external pressure to deactivate their surveillance infrastructure.

The psychological toll of this sustained assault is a calculated outcome of the spyware’s design. For researchers like Zayadin and Coogle, the knowledge that their phones are chance listening devices the adoption of “Lockdown Mode” and the abandonment of standard communication channels. This friction slows down investigations, complicates contact with sources, and forces the organization to divert resources toward digital defense. The goal of the “MANSAF” operator is not data exfiltration the paralysis of the watchdog function itself. By making digital communication toxic, the state quarantines HRW staff from the civil society they seek to protect.

NSO Group’s Compliance Failure

NSO Group has repeatedly stated that it investigates all credible allegations of misuse and terminates contracts with clients who violate human rights. The HRW cases provide a verifiable test of these claims. After the public of Lama Fakih’s infection in January 2022, HRW shared forensic evidence with NSO Group. If NSO’s compliance method were functional, the client responsible for targeting a US citizen and NGO director should have been suspended. Instead, the same client infrastructure remained active and was used to hack Adam Coogle ten months later. This continuity proves that NSO Group either absence the technical capacity to control its system or, more likely, chooses to ignore the targeting of civil society when the client is a strategic ally like Jordan.

The table outlines the correlation between HRW’s investigative work and the timeline of Pegasus infections, showing a clear pattern of retaliation.

The Diplomatic Paradox

The targeting of HRW staff in Jordan exposes a serious contradiction in Western foreign policy. The United States provides Jordan with over $1 billion in annual aid, partially justified by the kingdom’s status as a stabilizing force and a partner in counter-terrorism. Yet, the intelligence agencies funded and trained by this aid are using blacklisted technology to attack American citizens and the staff of American organizations. The silence of the US State Department regarding the hacking of Coogle and Fakih suggests a hierarchy of victims where the rights of NGO workers are subordinate to security cooperation. Until the US government enforces the logic of its own blacklist, by penalizing the users of the spyware, not just the vendor, the “MANSAF” operator continue to treat Human Rights Watch as a legitimate target for digital espionage.

The “Justice Fund” Laundering Scheme

The financial architecture supporting the deployment of Pegasus in Poland represents one of the most cynical misappropriations of public resources in modern European history. While NSO Group markets its flagship weapon as a tool for legitimate law enforcement funded by transparent state budgets, the Polish acquisition relied on a complex money-laundering operation designed to bypass parliamentary oversight. The method centered on the Fundusz Sprawiedliwości (Justice Fund), a state treasury reserve legally mandated to assist victims of crime and rehabilitate ex-convicts. Instead of supporting domestic violence shelters or accident victims, these funds were diverted to finance military-grade cyber-espionage against the political opposition.

In September 2017, then-Deputy Justice Minister Michał Woś authorized a transfer of 25 million PLN (approximately €6 million) from the Justice Fund to the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau (CBA). This transaction violated Article 231 of the Polish Penal Code and the Public Finance Act, which strictly prohibits the CBA from receiving operational financing outside the central state budget. The diversion was necessary because a direct budgetary allocation for “total surveillance spyware” would have required approval from the Sejm’s Public Finance Committee, alerting the opposition to the acquisition. By raiding the Justice Fund, the Law and Justice (PiS) leadership secured the weapon in secrecy, stealing from crime victims to victimize civil society.

The Matic Sp. z o. o. Intermediary

NSO Group frequently claims it maintains strict “Know Your Customer” (KYC), selling only to vetted government agencies. The Polish transaction exposes this assertion as a fabrication. The CBA did not purchase Pegasus directly from NSO Group. To further obscure the money trail, the transaction was routed through a private intermediary: Matic Sp. z o. o., a Warsaw-based IT and defense contractor. The Supreme Audit Office (NIK) uncovered that Matic purchased the system from NSO Group for 25 million PLN, the exact amount drained from the Justice Fund, and then resold it to the CBA for 33. 4 million PLN. This markup of 8. 4 million PLN served as a laundering fee, allowing Matic to absorb the compliance risk while NSO Group could claim on paper that it was dealing with a private entity, or conversely, that it had a “government end-user” while ignoring the illegal funding source.

This triangular arrangement allowed NSO Group to bypass standard due diligence. A rigorous compliance check would have flagged that a private Polish company purchasing Grade A cyber-weapons for a state agency using funds earmarked for crime victims was a red flag for corruption. Instead, NSO Group facilitated the sale. The invoice discovered by NIK auditors during a classified inspection of the CBA’s finances became the smoking gun. It listed “special technique systems” rather than Pegasus by name, a euphemism maintained until the 2022 Citizen Lab forced the government’s hand. The use of Matic Sp. z o. o. demonstrates that NSO Group’s sales strategy actively incorporates cutouts to defeat transparency laws in client nations.

The 2024-2025 Indictments

The collapse of the PiS government in late 2023 triggered a forensic accounting of the Pegasus purchase, leading to a wave of criminal charges that accelerated through 2024 and 2025. The “Bodnar Commission,” led by Justice Minister Adam Bodnar, systematically dismantled the legal immunity protecting the architects of the scheme. In June 2024, the Sejm voted to strip Michał Woś of his parliamentary immunity, paving the way for his indictment in October 2025. Prosecutors charged Woś with abuse of power and causing “large- financial detriment” to the public interest. The indictment that by authorizing the illegal transfer, Woś not only misappropriated funds also equipped the secret services with a weapon they were not legally authorized to possess or operate under existing Polish surveillance laws.

The legal dragnet expanded to encompass Marcin Romanowski, another former Deputy Justice Minister deeply involved in the Justice Fund’s administration. Investigators identified Romanowski as a key figure in an “organized criminal group” operating within the Ministry of Justice. The charges allege that Romanowski managed the bureaucratic that rubber-stamped the diversion of funds to the CBA, fully aware that the transaction violated public finance discipline. In early 2026, a Warsaw court re-issued an arrest warrant for Romanowski after his initial immunity defense collapsed. The charges carry a chance sentence of up to ten years in prison, reflecting the severity of repurposing humanitarian aid for political warfare.

The Hungarian Asylum and Continued Impunity

The of justice has faced geopolitical obstruction. As the indictments loomed, key figures in the scandal fled Poland. Former Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro, the architect of the judicial overhaul and the authority over the Justice Fund, and his deputy Marcin Romanowski, sought refuge in Hungary. In February 2026, reports confirmed that the government of Viktor Orbán had granted asylum to the fugitives, shielding them from European Arrest Warrants. This development internationalized the scandal, creating a “sanctuary for spyware operators” within the European Union. The asylum grant suggests a coordinated effort by illiberal regimes to protect the networks that NSO Group’s proliferation.

The flight of Ziobro and Romanowski to Budapest is not a personal escape; it represents the consolidation of a bloc of nations committed to the use of mercenary spyware against EU democratic norms. Hungary, itself an early client of NSO Group, is harboring the officials who introduced the technology to Warsaw. This axis of impunity complicates the legal proceedings in Poland, as the primary decision-makers are beyond the reach of Polish prosecutors. Yet, the indictments against lower-level officials and the ongoing trial of Michał Woś proceed, establishing a judicial record of the illegality of the Pegasus acquisition.

Forensic Audit Findings by NIK

The criminal charges rely heavily on the evidentiary foundation laid by the Supreme Audit Office (NIK). Under the leadership of Marian Banaś, NIK auditors obstruction from the CBA and the Justice Ministry to document the financial flows. The NIK report, portions of which were declassified for the prosecution, details how the 25 million PLN transfer was executed with ” haste” and without the required impact assessments. The auditors found that the Justice Fund’s statute was retroactively interpreted to allow “counteracting the causes of crime” as a justification for funding the CBA, a legal stretch that prosecutors have deemed fraudulent.

also, the NIK investigation revealed that the maintenance costs for Pegasus, estimated at 20% of the initial purchase price annually, were likely buried in the CBA’s operational fund, which is classified. while the initial purchase required the Justice Fund heist, the continued operation of the spyware from 2018 to 2023 drained millions more from the Polish taxpayer, chance through similar accounting tricks. The “Justice Fund” was not a one-time transaction the seed capital for a six-year operation of illegal surveillance. The audit proved that the financial toxicity of Pegasus extends beyond the initial contract; it corrupts the entire budgetary framework of the client state.

NSO Group’s Compliance Failure

The “Justice Fund” indictments serve as a definitive rebuttal to NSO Group’s corporate defense narrative. In its “Transparency and Responsibility” reports, NSO claims to investigate allegations of misuse and to vet the source of funds. The Polish case demonstrates that NSO accepted payment from a private company (Matic) that was laundering money stolen from a victim support fund. There is no record of NSO questioning why the Polish Anti-Corruption Bureau could not pay for the system directly, or why the funds originated from a Ministry of Justice reserve rather than the security services budget. This willful blindness allowed NSO to profit from a transaction that was criminal under Polish law from the moment the contract was signed.

The indictment of the Polish officials implicitly indicts NSO’s business model. The company provided the technical means for a crime, financed by the proceeds of a separate crime (misappropriation of funds). The “Justice Fund” scandal removes the veneer of legitimacy NSO attempts to maintain. It shows that the company’s clients are frequently not “sovereign governments” acting lawfully, rogue factions within governments acting against their own constitutions and financial laws. The 25 million PLN invoice remains a permanent record of this complicity.

Restoration and the “Black Iris” Legacy

As of 2026, the new Polish administration has begun the process of restoring the Justice Fund to its statutory purpose. Funds are once again flowing to NGOs supporting domestic violence victims and rehabilitation centers. Yet, the legacy of the Pegasus purchase remains. The data stolen from Senator Krzysztof Brejza, Prosecutor Ewa Wrzosek, and the leaders of the Agrounia movement cannot be “returned.” The election integrity of 2019 was compromised by a tool bought with money meant for the. The “Justice Fund” case is a clear illustration of the moral inversion required to sustain the spyware industry: the safety of the citizens was liquidated to purchase the tools of their oppression.

The criminal trials of Woś and the of Romanowski and Ziobro are essential not just for Polish rule of law, as a global precedent. They mark the time that government ministers face prison time specifically for the financial crimes committed to acquire NSO Group’s technology. This legal angle, attacking the funding method, offers a new pathway for accountability, bypassing the national security secrecy privileges frequently invoked to block investigations into the surveillance itself. If the money was stolen, the purchase was illegal, and the fruit of that purchase, the surveillance data, is evidence of a crime.

The February 2026 Indictments: Piercing the Veil of Impunity

On February 25, 2026, the Polish National Prosecutor’s Office shattered the long-standing protective shell surrounding the country’s intelligence services. In a move that signaled the end of the post-PiS transitional phase and the beginning of hard accountability, prosecutors filed criminal charges against two former heads of Poland’s most sensitive security agencies. Piotr Pogonowski, who commanded the Internal Security Agency (ABW) from 2016 to 2022, and Maciej Materka, former chief of the Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW), were formally accused of abuse of power. The charges directly from their authorization of Pegasus spyware operations even with knowing the system absence necessary security accreditations. This legal action marks a historic shift. For years, the narrative surrounding NSO Group’s tools in Poland focused on the “Justice Fund” financial irregularities, a paper trail of misappropriated money. The 2026 indictments, yet, target the operational command itself. Prosecutors allege that Pogonowski and Materka knowingly exposed top-secret Polish intelligence data to foreign entities by feeding it into NSO Group’s Israeli servers. By sanctioning the use of an uncertified system, they allegedly bypassed the strict sovereignty requirements mandated for Polish classified information. If convicted, both men face up to three years in prison, a penalty that carries immense symbolic weight for a security apparatus accustomed to operating above the law. The timing of these charges is precise. They arrive just days before the Sejm investigative commission is scheduled to release its final report in March 2026. This synchronization suggests a coordinated effort between legislative inquiries and criminal prosecution, closing the net on the architects of the surveillance state. Materka immediately took to social media to deny the allegations, claiming he provided his officers with the “best possible tools” to combat threats. His defense mirrors the standard NSO Group line: that security invasive capability, regardless of the collateral damage to civil liberties or legal.

The CBA Connection: Ernest Bejda and the Operational Hub

While the charges against the ABW and SKW chiefs represent a widening of the net, the core of the scandal remains the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau (CBA), the agency that originally purchased and most aggressively deployed Pegasus. In December 2025, prosecutors charged Ernest Bejda, the CBA head from 2015 to 2020, with exceeding his authority. Bejda is a central figure in the NSO-Poland nexus; his signature appears on the documents authorizing the transfer of 25 million PLN from the Justice Fund to buy the system. The charges against Bejda go beyond financial mismanagement. Investigators accuse him of allowing the processing of classified operational data through a system that had no legal basis to exist within the Polish IT infrastructure. Between September 2017 and February 2020, under Bejda’s watch, the CBA fed data from opposition politicians, lawyers, and activists into Pegasus. The prosecution this constituted a widespread breach of the Act on the Protection of Classified Information. Bejda refused to testify before the parliamentary commission, citing a Constitutional Tribunal ruling that declared the inquiry unconstitutional, a legal shield constructed by PiS-appointed judges that is crumbling under criminal scrutiny. The rot within the CBA extended to its deputy ranks. In October 2025, prosecutors charged Daniel K., a former deputy head of the bureau, with unlawfully disclosing operational material. The indictment details how Daniel K. transferred 15 DVDs containing surveillance data on Roman Giertych, a lawyer representing Donald Tusk, to Bogdan Święczkowski, the National Prosecutor at the time. This transfer of raw spy data to a political prosecutor illustrates the complete erasure of the firewall between intelligence gathering and political warfare. The material included attorney-client privileged communications, which were then leaked to state media outlets to discredit the opposition during election pattern.

The Political Architects: Kamiński and Wąsik

Hovering above the agency heads are the political masters of the operation: Mariusz Kamiński, the former Interior Minister and Coordinator of Special Services, and his deputy, Maciej Wąsik. As of late February 2026, the investigative commission has prepared notifications to the prosecutor identifying them as the “originators” of the Pegasus purchase and the primary coordinators of its political deployment. Kamiński and Wąsik are already entangled in a complex legal war. In October 2025, they were indicted for violating their ban on holding public office, a charge related to their earlier conviction for abuse of power in the “Land Scandal” and subsequent parliamentary antics. Yet, the Pegasus charges pose a far graver threat. Evidence gathered by the commission suggests they personally directed the targeting of specific political rivals, including the hacking of Senator Krzysztof Brejza’s phone during the 2019 election campaign. Their defense strategy relies on obstruction and immunity. Both men, Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), have refused to appear before the Sejm commission, dismissing it as a political vendetta. They hide behind the immunity granted by their Brussels seats. The Prosecutor General, Adam Bodnar, has initiated the procedure to lift this immunity, setting the stage for a high- showdown in the European Parliament. The argument for stripping their protection is strong: the alleged crimes involve the subversion of the democratic process itself using military-grade cyberweapons, a violation of the very EU values they are sworn to uphold.

The method of Illegality: Why the Charges Stick

The prosecution’s case rests on a technical devastating legal reality: Pegasus was never legal to use in Poland. Polish law requires that all systems processing classified information receive accreditation from the Internal Security Agency (ABW) or the Military Counterintelligence Service (SKW). Pegasus, by its design, sends data to NSO Group’s cloud infrastructure, meaning it could never meet Polish sovereignty standards. When Pogonowski (ABW) and Materka (SKW) authorized its use, they did not cut red tape; they privatized Poland’s most intrusive surveillance capability to a foreign corporation. The charges highlight that these intelligence chiefs knew the system was uncertifiable. They used it anyway, prioritizing the ability to hack encrypted devices over the legal requirement to protect state secrets. Also, the judicial oversight method was a farce. The investigation revealed that when CBA agents applied for court approval to surveil, they deliberately misled judges. Applications listed “cyber control” or generic wiretapping without specifying that the tool used would extract the entire contents of the device, including historical data, passwords, and encryption keys. Judges, absence technical clearance or knowledge of Pegasus, signed off on warrants they believed were for standard phone taps. This deception forms the basis of the fraud and abuse of power charges. The “fruits of the poisonous tree” doctrine is being applied to review hundreds of criminal cases where Pegasus evidence may have been surreptitiously introduced.

Institutional Obstruction and the “Total Opposition”

The prosecution of these intelligence chiefs is not proceeding in a vacuum. It faces fierce resistance from the remnants of the PiS judiciary. Bogdan Święczkowski, the former National Prosecutor who received the illicit DVDs from the CBA, sits on the Constitutional Tribunal. When prosecutors sought to charge him for his role in the Giertych leak, the Tribunal, staffed largely by PiS appointees, rejected the request to lift his immunity. This creates a bifurcated justice system: executive agencies under the new government are pursuing accountability, while the captured high courts attempt to freeze the process. The accused portray themselves as martyrs of a “total opposition” revenge campaign. They that Pegasus was a necessary tool for national security, citing its use in counter-terrorism and organized crime cases. Statistics released by the Prosecutor General show that of the approximately 578 surveilled between 2017 and 2022, the vast majority were indeed criminal suspects. Yet, the inclusion of prominent politicians, lawyers, and generals among the invalidates the “strictly security” defense. The prosecution that a tool used illegally against one citizen is illegal for all; the absence of certification poisons the entire well.

The International Precedent

The 2026 charges in Poland set a global precedent. While other nations like Spain and Greece have faced Pegasus scandals, Poland is the to systematically prosecute the intelligence chiefs responsible for its deployment. This moves the problem from political scandal to criminal liability. It sends a warning to security directors worldwide: hiding behind “national security” may no longer protect them from domestic criminal charges if they deploy blacklisted, unverified spyware against their own citizens. The indictment of Pogonowski, Materka, and Bejda demonstrates that the “sovereign immunity” frequently claimed by NSO Group’s clients is not absolute. When a government changes, the operational logs of the previous regime become evidence. The Polish investigation has proven that NSO Group’s assurances of “local compliance” are meaningless when the local operators themselves are acting outside the law. As the trials method, the testimony of these intelligence heads could reveal further details about NSO’s complicity, specifically how much the company knew about the political nature of the being selected by its Polish clients.

The Mechanics of Deception

The parliamentary inquiry dismantled the Law and Justice (PiS) party’s defense that all surveillance was “legal and court-approved.” The committee found that the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau (CBA) had systematically deceived the judiciary to obtain authorization for Pegasus infections. When submitting requests for “operational control,” the CBA deliberately omitted that they intended to use military-grade spyware capable of altering data and accessing historical content. Instead, judges were presented with generic requests for wiretapping, unaware they were authorizing total digital extraction. Testimony revealed that the courts had no technical capacity to audit the software being used. The inquiry termed this a “legal fiction” of oversight. By hiding the capabilities of Pegasus, the security services bypassed the constitutional requirement for proportionality. The committee’s final report declared that the government had created a “state within a state,” where intelligence agencies operated outside the bounds of the law, answerable only to party leadership rather than the public or the constitution.

Targeting the Opposition Nerve Center

The inquiry provided a forensic accounting of how Pegasus was used to cripple the Civic Coalition’s 2019 election campaign. The most damning evidence concerned Senator Krzysztof Brejza, the opposition’s campaign chief. Citizen Lab and Amnesty International forensics, validated by the committee, showed Brejza’s phone was compromised 33 times between April and October 2019.

The surveillance was not passive. The inquiry found that the stolen data was weaponized in real-time:

Dorota Brejza, the senator’s wife and lawyer, testified that the extraction of 85, 000 messages allowed the ruling party to anticipate every campaign move. More sinister was the “manipulation loop” identified by the committee: private messages were stolen, doctored to alter their context, and then leaked to the state broadcaster, TVP. These fabricated scandals were broadcast during prime time to discredit Brejza, forcing the campaign to pivot from offense to defense. The Senate committee concluded that this interference rendered the 2019 elections “unfair,” as the ruling party had wiretapped the opposition’s strategy room.

The “Justice Fund” Diversion

While the criminal indictments for the financing scheme would come later, the parliamentary inquiry established the *fact* of the illegal funding method as a core component of the widespread abuse. The committee confirmed that the 25 million PLN used to purchase Pegasus did not come from the state budget, which would have required parliamentary approval, was siphoned from the “Justice Fund” (Fundusz Sprawiedliwości). This fund was legally for aiding victims of crime and rehabilitating prisoners. The inquiry found that the Ministry of Justice, led by Zbigniew Ziobro, authorized the transfer to the CBA in a clandestine transaction designed to evade the scrutiny of the Sejm’s public finance committee. The Supreme Audit Office (NIK) testified that this transaction was a flagrant violation of public finance discipline. The inquiry characterized this as a “double crime”: stealing from victims of crime to purchase a weapon used to victimize political opponents.

The Architecture of Impunity

The Sejm commission’s work in 2024 and 2025 highlighted the refusal of key figures to cooperate, which the committee as further evidence of widespread rot. Former ministers Mariusz Kamiński and Maciej Wąsik, along with PiS chairman Jarosław Kaczyński, initially boycotted hearings or refused to take complete oaths, citing classified information. yet, the documentary evidence seized by the new government was irrefutable. The inquiry unearthed internal emails and operational logs proving that the “products” of Pegasus surveillance were circulated among top party officials, not just intelligence analysts. This shattered the defense that the services were acting autonomously. The committee’s findings painted a picture of a “pyramid of surveillance,” where the intelligence services, the prosecutor’s office, and the state media operated as a single organism dedicated to the preservation of PiS power. The “Polish Watergate” inquiry concluded that the abuse was not an aberration a feature of the governance model. The absence of independent oversight, the politicization of the prosecutor’s office (which refused to investigate initial complaints), and the complicity of state media created a closed loop of impunity. These findings laid the necessary political and evidentiary groundwork for the wave of criminal charges that would follow in 2026, marking the time in Polish history that the heads of intelligence services would face prison for the weaponization of surveillance technology.

The Illusion of Impenetrability: Apple’s and NSO’s Battering Ram

The introduction of “Lockdown Mode” by Apple in iOS 16 marked a significant escalation in the technical conflict between the Cupertino tech giant and the mercenary spyware industry. Marketed as an “extreme” protection level for users facing grave threats, Lockdown Mode was designed to reduce the attack surface of the iPhone by disabling features like Just-In-Time (JIT) JavaScript compilation and blocking unsolicited message attachments. For NSO Group, this development represented a formidable barrier, yet it did not function as a permanent stop. The history of Pegasus deployment from 2023 through 2026 reveals a pattern of relentless adaptation, where NSO’s engineers shifted their focus from hardened front doors to obscure, unmonitored side entrances within the iOS architecture.

While Apple’s security teams successfully blocked specific exploit chains like “BLASTPASS” when Lockdown Mode was enabled, the reality for civil society in Jordan and Poland proved far more precarious. The vast majority of users, including high-risk activists and journalists, frequently operate standard iOS configurations due to the functionality trade-offs required by Lockdown Mode. Consequently, NSO Group continued to exploit the “default” state of the iPhone ecosystem with devastating efficiency. The spyware vendor’s ability to discover and weaponize zero-day vulnerabilities in deep system daemons, background processes that run unseen, allowed them to maintain a capability for zero-click infection that required no interaction from the victim.

BLASTPASS: Weaponizing the Digital Wallet

In September 2023, the Citizen Lab uncovered an exploit chain that demonstrated the extreme sophistication of NSO’s research division. Dubbed “BLASTPASS,” this attack vector utilized a pair of vulnerabilities, CVE-2023-41064 and CVE-2023-41061, to compromise devices running the latest version of iOS (then 16. 6). The genius of BLASTPASS lay in its delivery method: the Apple Wallet.

The attack began with a malicious attachment sent via iMessage. yet, unlike previous exploits that targeted the image rendering of the Messages app directly, this exploit leveraged PassKit, the framework responsible for Apple Pay and digital passes. The attachment appeared to the system as a legitimate pass file. When the iPhone processed this file, it triggered a buffer overflow in the ImageIO framework, specifically within the logic handling WebP images. This overflow allowed the attacker to execute arbitrary code.

Crucially, this exploit bypassed “BlastDoor,” a sandbox security feature Apple had introduced specifically to parse untrusted data in iMessage safely. By routing the attack through PassKit, NSO sidestepped the BlastDoor sandbox, moving the malicious execution into a different, less restricted process. This maneuver allowed Pegasus to install itself silently. While Apple confirmed that Lockdown Mode successfully blocked this specific chain, the incident exposed a frightening reality: NSO Group possessed the resources to map the detailed dependencies of iOS and identify pathways that Apple’s own engineers had not fully secured.

PWNYOURHOME: The Daemon-Level Assault

Prior to BLASTPASS, NSO Group deployed an equally complex exploit chain known as “PWNYOURHOME.” Discovered in April 2023, this method targeted the HomeKit framework, which manages smart home devices. The attack involved a two-step process., the attacker targeted the HomeDNCP process, a daemon responsible for HomeKit functionality. Second, it pivoted to the iMessage process to crash it and manipulate the device’s state.

The PWNYOURHOME exploit was particularly insidious because it targeted a daemon that runs in the background, frequently with high privileges. Unlike an application that a user opens and closes, system daemons like homed and findmy (the target of the related “FINDMY” exploit) are always active. This persistence allows for infection attempts at any time, day or night.

Forensic analysis of victims’ devices showed that PWNYOURHOME left very few traces., the only evidence of the attack was a series of anomalous crashes in the targeted daemons. NSO’s developers had implemented method to scrub log files, removing the “breadcrumbs” that researchers use to identify a compromise. This anti-forensic capability complicates the attribution process, making it difficult for victims in Poland and Jordan to prove they were targeted until months or years after the fact.

The Jordanian Field Test: Civil Society Under Siege

The theoretical battle between Apple and NSO Group manifested as a tangible nightmare for civil society in Jordan. A joint investigation by Access and the Citizen Lab, published in February 2024, confirmed that at least 35 journalists, lawyers, and activists in Jordan were targeted with Pegasus between 2019 and late 2023. These infections occurred well after the US government placed NSO Group on its Entity List, proving that blacklisting did not degrade the company’s operational capability or its willingness to service authoritarian clients.

One prominent victim, human rights lawyer Hala Ahed, faced repeated targeting. Forensic analysis revealed that her device was attacked using multiple distinct exploit chains over several years. The persistence of these attacks demonstrates that for a determined state actor, the cost of burning zero-day exploits is acceptable if it guarantees access to a high-value target.

The Jordanian campaign also highlighted the limitations of user-centric defenses. of the targeted individuals were not technical experts; they relied on their devices for daily communication and advocacy. The requirement to enable Lockdown Mode, which disables features like link previews and restricts web browsing, was frequently viewed as an impediment to their work. NSO Group exploited this friction. By the time activists became aware of the need for advanced protection, their devices were already compromised. The spyware had already exfiltrated their contacts, chats, and location history, rendering subsequent security measures moot for past data.

Poland’s “Watergate”: Industrial- Surveillance

In Poland, the deployment of Pegasus took on a different character, resembling a dragnet rather than targeted espionage. The “Polish Watergate” scandal, which fully unraveled between 2024 and 2025, revealed that the Law and Justice (PiS) government had targeted over 600 individuals. This list included opposition politicians like Krzysztof Brejza, also prosecutors, activists, and even members of the ruling party itself.

The technical aspect of the Polish campaign relied heavily on the “forced entry” capabilities of Pegasus. During the 2019 parliamentary elections, Brejza’s phone was compromised 33 times. The sheer frequency of these attacks suggests that the operators were not concerned with stealth or conserving exploits. They treated the spyware as a standard investigative tool, using it to harvest tactical political intelligence in real-time.

The Polish investigation, led by a special parliamentary commission and later by prosecutors, uncovered that the purchase of Pegasus was financed illegally through the “Justice Fund,” a pool of money intended for victims of crime. This bureaucratic subterfuge allowed the Central Anti-Corruption Bureau (CBA) to acquire the system without proper parliamentary oversight. The technical logs recovered during the 2025 inquiry showed that Polish operators utilized NSO’s infrastructure to bypass encryption on apps like WhatsApp and Signal, nullifying the privacy protections these applications promised to users.

The Zero-Click Reality: No User Error Required

The defining feature of NSO’s operations in both Jordan and Poland remains the “zero-click” exploit. In the early days of spyware, attackers relied on social engineering, sending a text message with a malicious link and hoping the victim would click. This method had a high failure rate and alerted the victim to suspicious activity.

The shift to zero-click attacks fundamentally altered the security equation. In a zero-click scenario, the victim receives a message, a call, or a silent push notification, and the device is compromised immediately. The user sees nothing, clicks nothing, and accepts nothing. The exploit executes in the background, installs the Pegasus payload, and then frequently deletes the initial malicious message to hide its tracks.

For the victims in Jordan, this meant that “digital hygiene”, the practice of not clicking unknown links, was useless. Daoud Kuttab, an award-winning journalist, was hacked three times. His caution and experience offered no protection against a weapon that exploited the fundamental way iOS processes data. The existence of these vulnerabilities in core Apple frameworks like CoreGraphics, WebKit, and PassKit means that as long as an iPhone is connected to a network, it is chance to an entity with NSO’s resources.

The 2026 Outlook: A Perpetual Arms Race

As of February 2026, the remains unchanged. Apple continues to patch vulnerabilities with impressive speed, frequently releasing updates within days of discovery. yet, the “patch gap”, the window between an exploit’s development and the widespread installation of the fix, remains NSO Group’s operational domain.

Recent charges brought against former Polish security chiefs in early 2026 for their role in the Pegasus scandal serve as a legal reckoning, they do not solve the technical problem. The global market for zero-day exploits remains active. Researchers continue to find traces of new exploit chains that probe the edges of Apple’s defenses, looking for the “PassKit” or “HomeKit.”

Lockdown Mode stands as a testament to the severity of the threat, a rare admission by a consumer electronics company that its standard protections are insufficient against state-sponsored adversaries. Yet, for the civil society members in Amman and Warsaw, the shield arrived too late, or proved too difficult to hold up constantly. The persistence of Pegasus infections demonstrates that in the absence of a complete moratorium on spyware technology, software defenses alone are speed bumps for an industry fueled by millions of dollars in government contracts.

The operational footprint of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in Jordan has mutated from a tool of domestic surveillance into a method for transnational repression, directly challenging the sovereignty of allied nations and the safety of dual nationals. even with the United States placing NSO Group on the Entity List in November 2021, the Hashemite Kingdom, a major recipient of American foreign aid, accelerated its deployment of the blacklisted technology. This escalation is not an internal crackdown; it represents a calculated effort to control the narrative regarding Jordan’s political stability and royal wealth beyond its borders, targeting the very individuals who serve as conduits of information to the international community.

The Targeting of American Citizens: The Daoud Kuttab Case

The most diplomatically explosive concerns the repeated infection of Daoud Kuttab, a prominent Palestinian-American journalist and the former Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. Kuttab, who holds United States citizenship, was targeted with Pegasus spyware at least three times between February 2022 and September 2023. These infections occurred well after the Biden administration sanctioned NSO Group, signaling a direct disregard for US regulatory actions by Jordanian intelligence services.

Forensic analysis by Access and the Citizen Lab confirmed that Kuttab’s device was compromised on February 21, 2022, June 17, 2022, and September 3, 2023. The timing of these attacks correlates with his movements and journalistic output. On March 8, 2022, two weeks after the initial infection, Kuttab was detained at Queen Alia International Airport upon his arrival in Amman. The interrogation focused on a 2019 article, yet the deployment of military-grade spyware against a US citizen suggests a broader intelligence objective: monitoring his communications with Washington policymakers and international human rights bodies.

The infection of a US national’s device by a foreign government using blacklisted technology constitutes a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Yet, the diplomatic has been minimal, exposing a serious gap in the enforcement of the Entity List. The ability of the operator, identified as “MANSAF,” to target Kuttab demonstrates that NSO’s geolocation and data extraction capabilities remain active against American, provided the infection vector originates outside US soil or a roaming device.

Silencing the Global Investigators: The OCCRP Connection

The transnational nature of Jordan’s surveillance campaign is most clear in its targeting of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP). This international consortium of investigative journalists specializes in tracking illicit money flows and cross-border corruption. In 2022, OCCRP published the “Suisse Secrets” investigation, which leaked data from Credit Suisse revealing that King Abdullah II held six accounts with a maximum balance of 230 million Swiss francs. The contradicted the narrative of austerity promoted domestically during Jordan’s economic emergency.

In the lead-up to and aftermath of these publications, Pegasus was deployed against Rana Sabbagh, OCCRP’s senior editor for the Middle East and North Africa, and Lara Dihmis, an investigative reporter. Sabbagh, a veteran journalist and co-founder of Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ), had her devices infected multiple times. The forensic evidence points to a clear motive: the Jordanian security apparatus sought to intercept the “Suisse Secrets” data before publication and identify the whistleblowers assisting the consortium.

This targeting qualifies as transnational repression because the subject matter, offshore wealth in Switzerland, and the organization, a global investigative body, operate outside Jordan’s legal jurisdiction. The use of Pegasus allowed Jordanian intelligence to bypass the legal protections afforded to journalists in Europe and the United States, extending the Kingdom’s policing powers into the digital archives of an international media organization. The “MANSAF” operator did not need to physically detain Sabbagh or Dihmis to raid their newsroom; the spyware provided real-time access to their encrypted communications with sources in Zurich, London, and Washington.

The “MANSAF” Infrastructure: A Global Dragnet

Technical analysis of the “MANSAF” operator reveals an infrastructure designed for reach beyond local cellular networks. Citizen Lab identified that “MANSAF” has been active since December 2018, utilizing SMS lures and zero-click exploits that map to a cluster of domain names mimicking global services. Unlike the “BLACKIRIS” operator, which focuses almost exclusively on domestic Jordanian, “MANSAF” shows a targeting pattern consistent with counter-intelligence and external monitoring, with operations detected in Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and Iraq.

The operator’s persistence is notable. Even after Apple notified victims in November 2021 and initiated a lawsuit against NSO Group, “MANSAF” continued its operations without pause. The deployment of the “BLASTPASS” exploit in 2023, which bypassed Apple’s BlastDoor security feature, indicates that the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate (GID) maintained access to NSO’s premium support and update channels. This continued service contract contradicts NSO Group’s public assertions that it terminates contracts with clients who abuse the software for human rights violations.

The Attack on International NGOs

The surveillance net expanded to include staff from Human Rights Watch (HRW), an organization headquartered in New York. Adam Coogle, the Deputy Middle East and North Africa Director for HRW, was infected with Pegasus on October 2, 2022. Coogle’s infection, confirmed by Amnesty International’s Security Lab, utilized a zero-click exploit targeting the HomeKit vulnerability on his iPhone. Hiba Zayadin, a senior researcher for HRW, also received threat notifications from Apple indicating state-sponsored targeting.

Targeting senior staff of a US-based international NGO represents a significant escalation in transnational repression. It signals that the Jordanian security establishment views independent human rights monitoring as a national security threat comparable to terrorism. The infection of Coogle’s device occurred just two weeks after HRW published a report documenting the systematic harassment of political activists in Jordan. The correlation implies a retaliatory motive, intended to intimidate the organization and compromise its network of sources within the Kingdom.

This aggression forces international organizations to operate as if they are in a hostile cyber-environment, necessitating the use of burner phones and air-gapped systems reserved for war zones. The psychological toll on the diaspora and international staff is severe; the knowledge that a phone is a listening device creates a “digital exile,” where individuals are from their support networks because communication carries the risk of infection for the recipient.

Diplomatic Hypocrisy and the Aid Paradox

The continued operation of Pegasus by Jordan presents a clear paradox in US foreign policy. Jordan is one of the largest recipients of US bilateral aid, receiving over $1. 45 billion annually. This aid is contingent on various stability and reform benchmarks. yet, the use of blacklisted Israeli technology to hack American citizens and staff of American NGOs occurs without public consequence. The State Department has condemned the misuse of spyware in the abstract, yet the specific targeting of Daoud Kuttab has not resulted in a suspension of intelligence cooperation or military aid.

This inaction emboldens the “MANSAF” operator. The absence of repercussions suggests a tacit acceptance of the “security exception”, the idea that Jordan’s role as a buffer state and intelligence partner against regional threats justifies its domestic excesses. yet, the definition of “security” has been stretched to include the protection of the Royal Court’s financial reputation and the suppression of peaceful dissent. By failing to enforce the consequences of the Entity List, the US subsidizes the very repression it claims to oppose, allowing American taxpayer money to flow to a regime that uses banned tech to spy on Americans.

The trajectory of these infections, continuing through late 2023 and into the operational window of 2024, confirms that the US blacklisting of NSO Group failed to sever the supply chain to strategic allies. Jordan did not seek an alternative, less controversial vendor; it doubled down on Pegasus, relying on the geopolitical shield of its alliance with Washington to protect it from the of its transnational espionage.

The Accountability Void: absence of Legal Redress for Victims even with Proven Abuse

The chasm between documented surveillance abuses and legal accountability remains absolute. While forensic methodology has successfully identified NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware on the devices of journalists and activists, the legal systems in client nations and international courts have failed to provide restitution. Victims are trapped in a jurisdictional limbo where state secrecy laws, sovereign immunity, and corporate opacity immunize the perpetrators.

Jordan: Impunity by Design

In Jordan, the deployment of Pegasus against civil society continues with zero legal recourse for. A February 2024 investigation by Access and Citizen Lab confirmed that at least 35 journalists, lawyers, and human rights defenders were hacked between 2019 and September 2023. This timeline confirms that Jordanian operators continued to use the spyware long after the U. S. Department of Commerce added NSO Group to its Entity List in November 2021.

Prominent victims include Adam Coogle, a deputy director at Human Rights Watch, and Daoud Kuttab, an award-winning journalist. Human rights lawyer Hala Ahed Deeb was targeted repeatedly, with forensic traces found on her device as as 2023. even with this irrefutable evidence, the Jordanian government denies involvement, and the kingdom’s judicial system offers no route for independent inquiry. Prosecutors have refused to open investigations into the surveillance of their own citizens, and the absence of separation between the judiciary and the security apparatus renders domestic legal action impossible. The U. S. blacklisting has neither halted the supply of spyware to Jordan nor compelled the monarchy to answer for these violations.

Poland: Justice Delayed and Politicized

Poland offers a clear example of how accountability relies entirely on political upheaval rather than institutional safeguards. For years, the Law and Justice (PiS) government used Pegasus to monitor opposition figures with impunity. It was only after the coalition government led by Donald Tusk took power that the state apparatus acknowledged the abuse. In February 2026, prosecutors brought charges against former intelligence chiefs Piotr Pogonowski (ABW) and Maciej Materka (SKW) for authorizing the system without proper accreditation.

While these indictments mark a rare instance of state officials facing consequences, they offer little solace to victims like prosecutor Ewa Wrzosek and MEP Krzysztof Brejza, whose private communications were weaponized against them during the 2019 election pattern. For nearly half a decade, these victims were stonewalled by the very institutions designed to protect them. The current investigations reveal that approximately 600 individuals were targeted, yet the route to financial compensation or civil damages remains with procedural blocks. The Polish case demonstrates that without a total regime change, the “national security” defense successfully shields illegal surveillance from judicial review.

The Failure of Civil Litigation

Attempts to hold NSO Group accountable through Western courts have yielded diminishing returns. In the United States, high-profile lawsuits have faced serious headwinds. In late 2024, Apple voluntarily terminated its lawsuit against NSO Group, citing the risk that the discovery process would expose serious threat intelligence to the spyware vendor. Similarly, while a U. S. judge granted a permanent injunction in October 2025 barring NSO from targeting WhatsApp users, the court slashed the damages award from a jury-recommended $168 million to a mere $4 million. These outcomes send a clear signal: the financial and operational costs of litigation are insufficient to the mercenary spyware industry.