NSO affair: The secret military service in Belgium published - the Pegasus spyware program was installed on the phones of a Belgian journalist and his wife.

Following the revelations of the Pegasus Project, Belgium’s military intelligence drew up a list of probable victims, checked their phones, and subsequently found signs of an attack using Pegasus spyware on the mobile devices of a Belgian journalist and his wife.

In July, a global investigation by 17 media organizations, including The Wire, had revealed how weapons-grade spyware manufactured and sold by Israel’s NSO Group may have potentially been used to target a large number of world leaders, politicians, journalists, government officials, lawyers and civil society members. This was based on an investigation of a leaked database of unattributed 50,000 phone numbers and forensic analyses of over 67 devices by Amnesty International’s Security Lab.

The Pegasus Project’s Belgian media partners, Knack and Le Soir, have found that following the revelations of the Pegasus Project, Belgium’s military intelligence service, the General Intelligence and Security Service (known by both its Dutch and French acronyms, ADVID-SGRS) launched an investigation by drawing up a list of several Belgian citizens who could be potential targets of the spyware.

In the intelligence agency’s report dated September 16 accessed by Knack and Le Soir, ADIV wrote that journalist Peter Verlinden and his wife, Marie Bamutese, were contacted by the intelligence agency for a “security check of their communication devices”.

“As the full investigations are still ongoing, our service assesses likely that both Peter Verlinden and Marie Bamutese’s devices have been targetted by the Pegasus software. Given the timing of the intrusion and the nature of the individuals targetted, the SGRS assesses that such an intrusion was very likely initiated by Rwanda,”