Spyware scandal deepens: Another Italian journalist hit with Paragon spyware

A second Italian journalist was recently targeted by the Israeli-made spyware Paragon, internet watchdog group Citizen Lab said, raising new questions about a surveillance scandal that has already led Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's government and Paragon to part ways.

Citizen Lab said in a report on Thursday that Italian investigative journalist Ciro Pellegrino's iPhone showed evidence of having been targeted by Paragon's sophisticated spy software.

Pellegrino works at the online newspaper Fanpage, whose editor-in-chief Francesco Cancellato earlier disclosed that he was one of scores of users who received January alerts from WhatsApp that they had been targeted using Paragon's technology.

Fanpage has published a stream of critical coverage of Meloni's government, notably an exposé tying her party's youth wing to neo-Nazi activity, and the allegation that Fanpage's journalists, among others, were put under surveillance has stirred controversy in Italy.

On Monday, the government and Paragon announced that they were no longer working together, offering conflicting explanations about who fired whom.

Paragon referred questions back to an earlier statement it provided to the Israeli publication Haaretz in which it said it had offered Italian officials a way to check whether its systems had been used against Cancellato, but that Italian authorities had rebuffed the offer.

Italian officials did not return a message seeking comment on the Citizen Lab report.

In a text exchange with Reuters, Pellegrino said the discovery that he had been targeted with spyware was "horrible." The Naples-based journalist said his phone was "the black box of my life, which contains everything from personal and health data to journalistic sources."

Although an Italian parliamentary panel reported on Monday that the country's spy services had deployed Paragon's tools to intercept the communications of migrant sea rescue activists in the context of law enforcement work, the panel said it had found no evidence that the tools were used by Italian intelligence to go after Fanpage's Cancellato.

The discovery of Paragon spyware on the phone of one of Cancellato's colleagues adds to questions about the panel's thoroughness, said Natalia Krapiva, a senior lawyer with Access Now, a human rights group that works with spyware victims. "It sheds serious doubt on the adequacy of the investigation," she said.

The Italian parliamentary panel, which has reserved the right to conduct further investigations around the matter, did not respond to a message seeking comment.

In its report, Citizen Lab also said that an unnamed European journalist was hacked with Paragon's spyware. The lab, which is based out of the University of Toronto, offered no other details and declined to answer questions about the journalist's identity or the circumstances of their targeting.

A report from Italy’s parliamentary security committee earlier this month confirmed that the Italian government officially terminated its contract with the Israeli spyware firm Paragon. This decision was made after public outcry over allegations that the spyware had been used to target journalists and migrant rescue activists critical of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government.