Israeli spyware targeted journalists from several countries on WhatsApp

ROME - A spyware developed by Israel-based company Paragon has been used against more than 90 journalists from various countries, including Latvia, on WhatsApp, representatives of WhatsApp informed.

As communication between WhatsApp and Italian law enforcement has revealed, the case features phone prefixes of more than ten countries, including Latvia.

Francesco Cancellato, the editor-in-chief of Fanpage, a highly regarded investigative news outlet, was the first to publicly state last Friday that he was one of the 90 people who had been notified by WhatsApp that his mobile phone had been targeted, and likely compromised, by the hacking software.

WhatsApp, which belongs to Meta, has not identified the targets or their exact locations, but said that they are located in more than 20 countries, including Europe.

According to WhatsApp representatives, last December, the platform's staff discovered that the Paragon spyware was being used to target the application's users and blocked the vector that was used to affect the potential targets.

Like many other spyware developers, Paragon sells its software known as Graphite to government agencies which use it to combat crime.

Besides phone numbers with Italian prefixes, the case features phone numbers with prefixes of Belgium, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Austria, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Belgium, the statement said.