On Friday, at 2:48 PM, Francesco Cancellato received an ominous report on his mobile phone while he was at home near Milan.
“This is a message from WhatsApp,” read the message in Italian, which was obtained by Techcrunch. “In December WhatsApp interrupted the activities of a Spyware company that we believe attacked your device. Our studies indicate that you may have received a harmful file via WhatsApp and that the spyware may have resulted in access to your data, including messages stored on the device. ”
“We have made changes to prevent this specific attack from taking place again. However, the operating system of your device can remain compromised because of the spyware, ”continued the message.
Cancellato is the first target that emerges after the disclosure of a hacking campaign performed using spyware that was reportedly made by Paragon Solutions, as WhatsApp claimed on Friday.
At that time, WhatsApp said that the spy campaign had focused on around 90 people, including journalists such as Cancellato and members of civil society around the world, also in Europe.
“I feel violated,” Cancellato told Techcrunch. He said he thought in the beginning that the message was a scam or a joke. “You always think somehow that a journalist can be delegated or spied on, but you do it more out of your own paranoia and for the fact that you may be. If someone tells you that it is true, you tend not to believe it, you always think it’s something else. “
Then he said he realized that it was real. ‘You wonder yourself, why me? This is the thing, I mean, what did they want from me? “
“That is the first question, the second question is what they have taken from me? Where are they going? What did they do to me? Once they have entered my phone, where my entire life is actually, my holidays, my friendships, my family, my bank passwords, there is everything – my work, “said Cancellato. “And then the third question is who did it?”
Cancellato is the director of Fanpage.itAn Italian news website is that Known for research in corruption, organized crime, the Catholic Church, and the youth wing of the extreme right-wing ruling party in Italy, led by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni.
Before that Multi-Dede Research Last year Fanpage sent reporters undercover to infiltrate the ‘Gioventù Meloniana’, a group that is part of Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia party, which has ruled Italy since 2022. People, sing N-words and Nazi slogans and sing about the fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini.
Contact us
Do you have more information about Paragon and this Spyware campaign? From a non-work device you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai Veilig on signal on +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb or e-mail. You can also contact Techcrunch via SecureDrop.
Cancellato said he decided come out publicly Because as a journalist his job is to report the news. However, he said he did not want to speculate who was behind it. At the moment there are many unanswered questions. Including whether his phone had indeed been hacked or focused without success, which the hackers were looking and who ordered the attack.
WhatsApp said that the hacking campaign was performed by Paragon Solutions, an Israeli spyware maker from the government who is said to sell a product to spy on coded apps, such as WhatsApp and Signal, Graphite, As Forbes reported in 2021.
A WhatsApp spokesperson did not respond to a request for comments asking if the company could confirm that Cancellato was a target.
The guardian A person quoted close to the company that sold Paragon Solutions its products to 35 democratic government customers. And Israeli news output Ynetnews reported Italy is a paragon customer on Monday.
Also on Monday, The Guardian reported That the Libyan activist Husam El Gomati, based in Sweden, was also informed by WhatsApp as one of the goals of the hacking campaign. El Gomati Has been vocal criticize Italy’s relationship with Libya, in particular an agreement between the two countries to prevent immigrants from crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
Techcrunch did not receive a response after contact with the E -mail address of the Italian government, as well as with Fabrizio Alfano, the head of the Meloni press office, via E -Mail and WhatsApp.
Paragon Solutions has cultivated a reputation as a responsible surveillance -tech seller. On the official websiteThe company says it “offers ethically -based tools, teams and insights to disturb stubborn threats.”
An unnamed Paragon Solutions source told the New Yorker Last year that the company’s deal with the American immigration and customs enforcement months earlier in September was the result of a control process in which the company reportedly demonstrated that it could happen that the technology was used by other countries against Americans, but not the US government
Paragon Solutions was taken over in December 2024 by American private equity giant AE Industrial Partners.
Paragon Solutions and AE Industrial did not respond to a request for comments.
The message of WhatsApp to Cancellato suggested that he could contact Citizen Lab, a digital rights group at the University of Toronto who has investigated and exposed Spyware -abuses around the world for ten years, including Ethiopia, Mexico, Morocco, Saudi -Arabia And Spain.
Cancellato, who said he and Fanpage contacted the authorities, Techcrunch said that he “did what the message asked me to do.”
“It is actually very strange for a journalist to be spied in a Western democracy,” said Cancellato, adding that the phone that was aimed was his business apparatus, so “it is an attack on fan page; it’s not an attack on me. “