Newsweek Poland Krzysztof Brejza hacked with Pegasus. The Civic Platform Senator was spied on during the election campaign. Latest Try the Newsweek mobile application

Pegasus into Krzysztof Brejza

According to Brejza, the information stolen from his phone provided key information about the opposition's campaign strategy. In his opinion, in conjunction with the slander campaign on TVP, it made it impossible to conduct a "fair election process".

Some of the messages stolen from Brejza's phone had been manipulated and presented to appear to have created a hateful group to spread anti-government propaganda. According to the PO politician, such a group never existed. TVP reported on the matter abundantly using screens of news that allegedly came from Brejza's surroundings. Now the senator knows where TVP got them from.

- This operation destroyed the work of the election staff and destabilized my campaign. I do not know how many votes she could take away from me and the entire coalition - said Brejza AP.

The fact that he fell victim to the attack and the Pegasus system was used against him was already mentioned by Brejza at the end of October this year. The politician then submitted a notification to the prosecutor's office in this case and sued TVP. He argued that it was impossible that they could be obtained legally.

- The services worked together, downloaded my old texts from many. For example, from 2014 - he told Newsweek. How did he know that the secret services were behind the attack? - TVP officers claim that the materials that were later published by public television came from the investigation. So it was done by the CBA, and the source is fixed, because it was indicated by the author of the lampoon about me - explained the KO politician. The Citizen Lab findings cited by AP show that he was right.

According to Stanisław Żaryn, the spokesman of the minister for the coordinator of secret services, the Polish services use operational techniques in accordance with the law. - All theses that the services use this type of methods in operational work for the political game are false - Żaryn emphasized in an interview with PAP. The services "do not inform whether operational work methods have been applied to specific people," he added.

- In Poland, the operational control may be carried out after obtaining the consent of the Prosecutor General's Office and after issuing a relevant decision by the court - Żaryn said. He added that "these procedures are followed and the Polish services operate in accordance with the law."

Brejza's phone hack is the third case of a spy attack using Pegasus on an opponent of the PiS government unveiled by Citizen Lab this week. Roman Giertych was also the victim of the attack in 2019, and in 2021 prosecutor Ewa Wrzosek was spied on.

Fierce hacking of Giertych

AP announced on December 20, citing Citizen Lab's report, that in the last four months of 2019, Giertych's phone was supposed to be hacked at least 18 times.

As an attorney, Giertych represented the then former Prime Minister Donald Tusk, the head of the European Council until November 2019, and Radosław Sikorski, the former head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and now an MEP. Most of the break-ins took place just before the elections in October 2019.

The "staggeringly aggressive" rate and intensity of the tracking - day after day and even hour after hour - suggested a "desperate desire to monitor his communication," said Citizen Lab's AP Scott-Railton. The hacking was so fierce that Giertych's iPhone became inoperable and the attorney stopped using it.

What is Pegasus and how does it work?

Pegasus is a surveillance system developed by the Israeli company NSO Group, founded by Niv Carmi, Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie. Former soldiers of the famous Military Intelligence Unit 8200, a true forge of Israeli technology industry cadres, the creators of NSO decided to commercially use their ability to hack smartphones remotely - so that they could monitor all activity of their users, even conversations using encrypted messaging as many as WhatsApp, Signal or Telegram. The first version of the tool was created in 2011, and shortly thereafter NSO managed to sell it to the Mexican government. Government agencies in this country, using Pegasus, tracked members of drug cartels (apparently it was Pegasus who helped track down and comprehend the famous El Chapo).

The first versions of Pegasus to install malware required some kind of user reaction: opening a message, clicking a link, etc. The NSO specialists themselves admitted that the attack must be carefully planned to be credible and induce the target to click on the message or link.

What could such an attack look like? In 2019, Wojciech Cieśla described it in "Newsweek": "It is August 2016, when Ahmed Mansoor, an activist for human rights in the United Arab Emirates, receives an SMS from an unknown number. The news sounds tempting: someone proposes new information on torture in state prisons. A link to the website is pasted in the message. He takes a screenshot and sends it to friends at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto who previously helped him defend himself against digital attacks. Thanks to the link from the Emirates, Citizen Lab scientists determine that behind the message that was supposed to install spyware on Mansoor's phone, there is a mysterious Israeli company NSO Group ”.

READ MORE: PiS Spied On Opposition Lawyers Using The Israeli System. Giertych: "You will all sit for it"