EU Politician Investigating Pegasus Spyware Discovers His Own Phone Was Hacked

A forensic report by Citizen Lab reveals that an EU politician investigating the Pegasus spyware was himself hacked with the cyber-weapon during the probe.

In a chilling display of digital irony, a leading Greek politician tasked with investigating the illicit deployment of the Pegasus spyware has discovered that his own mobile device was compromised by the exact same cyber-weapon.

During the autumn of 2022, Stelios Kouloglou, a prominent investigative journalist and Member of the European Parliament, was aggressively probing the misuse of surveillance technologies as part of the specialized PEGA Committee. According to a devastating new forensic report published by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, his Apple iPhone was silently infiltrated multiple times during the height of the investigation.

The revelation that a parliamentary investigator was actively monitored by the subject of his investigation strikes at the heart of European democratic security. Kouloglou expressed absolute shock and deep anger, characterizing the decision to hack a sitting member of the PEGA Committee as recklessly brazen.

Citizen Lab researchers pinpointed the initial infection to October 21, 2022, a period when Kouloglou was traveling extensively to interview victims of spyware campaigns. A secondary infection was documented in March 2023, directly coinciding with critical internal negotiations and the drafting of the committee’s final legislative recommendations.

Pegasus represents the apex of commercial cyber-espionage. Unlike traditional malware that requires a target to click a malicious link, Pegasus utilizes zero-click exploits to silently infect devices running iOS and Android. Once embedded, it grants the operator total access to encrypted messages, physical location data, the camera, and the microphone.

The unchecked proliferation of commercial spyware is not a localized European crisis. Governments across the African continent have frequently weaponized similar military-grade surveillance tools to crush political opposition and silence investigative journalism.

In nations like Kenya, Nigeria, and Rwanda, human rights defenders have repeatedly flagged the deployment of sophisticated digital intercept technologies to monitor dissidents. The breach of the PEGA Committee demonstrates that even the highest echelons of international governance are fundamentally vulnerable to state- digital espionage.

John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, noted that it is currently "open spyware season on Europe’s lawmakers." Despite overwhelming evidence of abuse, international frameworks for regulating the sale and deployment of commercial cyber-weapons remain entirely inadequate.

Technological defenses, such as software patches and reboot protocols, are insufficient to protect against well-funded intelligence agencies. The targeting of Kouloglou proves that until stringent legal deterrents and massive financial penalties are enforced against the developers of these tools, parliamentary immunity in the digital age is nothing more than an illusion.

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