Apple has sent new notifications of mercenary spyware infections to almost 100 countries, with recipients including journalists and documentary filmmakers.

“Today’s notification is being sent to targeted users in 99 countries, and to date we have notified users in over 150 countries in total,” the company said. “The extreme cost, sophistication, and worldwide nature of mercenary spyware attacks make them some of the most advanced digital threats in existence today. As a result, Apple does not attribute the attacks or the notice you’re receiving to any specific attackers or geographical regions.”

Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment Friday about the countries targeted. Researchers and groups that work on spyware said the notifications were significant, however.

“This again promises to be an important set of notifications with a bunch of cases, based purely on what we see publicly,” said John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto. He also posted on social media about how potential victims could defend themselves, warning people to be cautious about companies that offer paid solutions to spyware infections.

He cautioned that the lack of notification doesn’t rule out an infection. The steps Apple recommends, which Scott-Railton seconded, were to enable Lockdown Mode and to get in touch with the digital rights group Access Now.

“The number of Apple threat notifications we are seeing from countries around the world indicates that the fight against the scourge of spyware abuse is far from over,” said Natalia Krapiva, senior tech-legal counsel with Access Now. “While we have increased our capacity to investigate spyware abuse, and companies like Apple have done a lot to notify and protect people from it, repressive states continue to use these powerful surveillance technologies, including against civil society actors and opposition figures.”

Apple sent its last major batch of notifications in August. The notifications frequently lead to victims approaching Access Now, The Citizen Lab and other groups seeking further assistance and prompting deeper investigations.

The notifications come shortly before the final rounds of negotiations over industry standards for commercial hacking tools being developed under the voluntary Pall Mall Process. The industry guidelines follow an earlier set of guidelines catered to governments.

“The states that will ultimately adopt these guidelines must come to terms that the current system is not working, and that the spyware industry must face some real consequences for the uncontrolled sale of these tools and refusal to curb the abuses,” Krapiva said.

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Two senators say that revelations about online targeted advertising being used as a vector for spyware infections underscore the need for better security practices in the industry.

Some members of the advertising industry that were subjects of the report, meanwhile, think their practices are up to the task.

The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, in partnership with the cybersecurity and ad-tech firm Confiant, last week published a report on AdFection, a technique whereby targeted ads were delivering zero-click mercenary spyware.

“Ad vendors must significantly level up their cybersecurity and threat detection capacity to effectively cut off malicious advertisers across the supply chain,” The Citizen Lab report states. “They must rigorously and regularly vet, screen, and audit their business partners and hold them accountable for their own supply chains.”

In 2023, Democratic Sens. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Cory Booker of New Jersey introduced legislation to ban advertising networks and facilitators from using personal data to target, but the legislation never advanced past introduction. Both said The Citizen Lab report illustrated the need for industry reform.

“The report underscores the growing risk of spyware and the increasingly sophisticated methods used to track and target people online,” Booker said in a statement to CyberScoop. “Americans need vastly stronger privacy protections that stay ahead of these evolving surveillance threats.”

The security threat of targeted online advertising to government devices is of particular concern to Wyden, with his letters to government agencies cited in the report. Wyden has called adtech a national security threat. Ads from Discover-Tech, the company most linked to AdFection, got impressions on government networks.

“Allowing targeted ads on government devices is an open invitation to spies and criminals. It’s the digital equivalent of leaving all the doors and windows unlocked at a sensitive government facility,” he said in a statement to CyberScoop.

“It’s clear that advertising exchanges are not meaningfully protecting users against malware and location tracking, which is why I’ve been urging the government to disable ads on government browsers and turn off mobile ad IDs, and have pushed my bill to ban all targeted advertising,” he continued. “The latest Citizen Lab report is an impressive reminder that this sector simply cannot be trusted to put users’ security ahead of profits.”

A number of U.S. agencies have taken steps to block ads due to the threats they pose, or recommended blocking them for feds.

Discover-Tech appeared on lists of “certified” and “approved” vendors that Google and the advertising industry association IAB Europe maintained. Google participated in the report, but IAB Europe didn’t respond to it until after publication. Both provided additional comments to CyberScoop.

Google and IAB Europe, and the ad networks Beeswax, Vungle and Eskimi all took steps to remove Discover-Tech’s access to the digital advertising ecosystem, according to the report. A mix of other ad systems replied to The Citizen Lab, but some did not, including Microsoft, which owns the ad system Xandr. Microsoft also didn’t respond to requests for comment from CyberScoop.

The Citizen Lab report concluded that the advertising industry displayed “a dangerous lack of due diligence” and criticized “broken digital infrastructure,” while also saying that the sector needed to “get serious” about security.

It said ad vendors needed to better share threat data, improve vetting of partners, audit vendor registries and ban vendors by default in jurisdictions known to be permissive of abuse.

In response to questions from CyberScoop about those conclusions, a Google spokesperson provided a statement.

“We banned Discover Tech during a joint investigation with Citizen Lab and Confiant,” the spokesperson said. “Throughout that work, we continuously blocked malicious ads to help people stay protected while we dismantled the network.”

Google said that its safety teams and systems continuously blocked individual bad ads from Discover-Tech, but banning them entirely from the platform required proof that their ad infrastructure was linked to spyware.

The company also said it regularly audits participants in its Authorized Buyer program, as well as deploying “multi-layered defenses to stop bad ads,” and that its automated systems detected over 99% of policy-violating ads before reaching users last year.

IAB Europe responded more specifically.

“The findings do not demonstrate that the digital advertising infrastructure is broken, but rather point to the potential misuse of existing technologies and functionalities that are not specific to digital advertising but inherent to web technologies,” said Lauren Wakefield, marketing and communications director for the association. “While the industry continuously invests in improving security and safeguards against fraud and other forms of misuse, the investigation of potentially unlawful activities, such as the deployment of spyware, ultimately falls within the remit of competent authorities.”

The Citizen Lab report also urges regulators to take action, including conducting an investigation of Discover-Tech and the spyware firm Candiru, which infect users through Discover-Tech online ads; “more closely scrutinize the advertising ecosystem to determine whether other companies are leveraging it for espionage and spyware delivery, and determine whether they have violated applicable laws and regulations;” and pursue sanctions against mercenary spyware firms and the companies that enable them.

“Preventing fraud and other forms of misuse is already an ongoing priority across the digital advertising ecosystem, and IAB Europe supports industry efforts to invest in technologies, processes and safeguards to identify and mitigate cybersecurity risks,” Wakefield continued. “We hope this report will be seen as an opportunity to reassess and improve existing approaches to cybersecurity. It is important to recognise that cybersecurity requirements and measures must be proportionate to the risks and circumstances of each individual company, which is why one-size-fits-all recommendations may not always be appropriate.”

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Spyware has been detected on devices used by some of Serbia’s most prominent figures connected to the country’s political upheaval, according to researchers who announced their findings Monday.

Vladan Ðokić, the rector of the University of Belgrade and prominent figure in the country’s student protest moment, and Rade Bajić, a lawyer with Serbia’s Public Prosecutor’s Office for Organized Crime, were targeted, according to research from the SHARE Foundation, a Serbian digital rights group, and The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto.

The new cases follow what the SHARE Foundation described in September as the largest documented wave of spyware surveillance in the country to date. That wave included 14 people, among them a member of parliament and a local government official, targeted with Pegasus and a new version of the NoviSpy Android spyware.

Đokić, an architect and former dean of the university’s Faculty of Architecture, has led the University of Belgrade since 2021. He has publicly backed the student-led anti-corruption protests that followed the 2024 Novi Sad railway station canopy collapse, and government officials and pro-government news outlets have portrayed him as a driving force behind the movement.

His tenure has included direct confrontations with the government. In March, Serbian authorities raided his offices, and reportedly seized computers and servers. After the incident, Đokić accused authorities of trying to humiliate the institution, saying police entered without prior notice or clear legal grounds.

Andrijana Ristić, a researcher at the SHARE Foundation, whose organization conducted the initial forensic analysis, said the case is the second confirmed Pegasus infection in Serbia this year. She declined to say when the infection was discovered, citing the sensitive nature of the investigation.

The device was then given to The Citizen Lab to further confirm that Pegasus was used.

“We found with high confidence that it was infected with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in 2026,” a report released by the lab reads. “The infection leveraged a zero-click exploit. No action, such as a click or opening a file was necessary for infection.”

Ðokić was unavailable for comment. 

Bajić was on the legal team prosecuting a high-profile corruption case involving Serbian government officials signing off on a $500 million hotel and residential tower planned for a protected historic site in Belgrade. According to recent reporting from The Guardian, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić allegedly pressed government officials to strip the building’s protection so that Affinity Partners, the private investment firm owned by Jared Kushner, could develop it into a Trump hotel. 

Bajić believes his work on the case led to him being a target of spyware. He pointed CyberScoop to news articles and Serbian television programs where Vučić referred to him as a “criminal” and part of a “gang that fabricated” the corruption case. 

“In my opinion, my involvement in this case was the sole reason for this unlawful spyware attack,” Bajić told CyberScoop.

Ristić told CyberScoop that Bajić received a threat notification from Apple, but neither SHARE nor Citizen Lab could pinpoint exactly what type of spyware his device was infected with. The investigation of Bajić’s device is ongoing.

Ristić described surveillance in Serbia as longstanding, tracing it to earlier tools such as FinFisher and alleged dealings with the hacking group Hacking Team — along with the original NoviSpy report by Amnesty International in 2024, which identified journalists, activists and civil society members as targets.

“I would definitely say that [spyware] is widespread,” she told CyberScoop. “I think right now it’s gaining much more media attention, especially internationally, because of the political moment.”

John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at The Citizen Lab, said “NSO has spent a decade claiming to turn over a new leaf each time an abuse surfaces. But there is no hiding the truth: Pegasus is a technology for repression. So it’s no accident that people standing up for freedom in the face of corruption keep getting hacked with NSO’s products.”

Serbia will hold parliamentary elections Oct. 25, with Vučić fighting to retain control of the government. The vote comes amid the student-led protest movement, fueled by anger over government corruption, that has grown into the largest challenge to Vučić’s rule in years.

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That online ad you saw for earbuds, a drone or bubble gum-scented car air freshener may have been a gateway for mercenary spyware that can infect your device without you ever having to click on it.

The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto on Thursday said it was revealing the first details of zero-click spyware being delivered through targeted advertising, which it’s calling AdFection. It concluded that while the Israeli company Discover-Tech presents itself as a legitimate advertising firm, in actuality it operates as a facilitator for multiple mercenary spyware partners, including the well-known Candiru. Its ads covertly direct millions of devices to contact Candiru’s servers.

The likely goal, according to the researchers, is large-scale tracking and surveillance, enabled by accident by major industry players like Google. The campaign led to the infection of devices at media outlet Al Jazeera, they said, but Discover-Tech’s ads have also appeared on many sensitive networks around the world, including at the U.S. Department of Defense, NATO, the International Atomic Energy Agency and world cybersecurity agencies, according to partner investigators at ad security firm Confiant.

It’s a discovery that the researchers said raises uncomfortable questions for regulators, whom The Citizen Lab said need to investigate Discover-Tech and levy sanctions, and for the online advertising industry.

“The adtech industry, the digital advertising industry, has a lot of rethinking to do to reconsider how they approach these threats of surveillance and the responsibilities that they have with the data that they collect and how it might be abused,” said Jerome Dangu, chief technology officer and co-founder of Confiant. “The industry has optimized against cyber criminals, scams and malware for profit that targets people for extracting money, but not for surveillance.”

Wolfie Cristl, senior researcher at The Citizen Lab, said it was “disastrous” that ad vendors didn’t detect the operation for years. Discover-Tech was registered in 2020 and has facilitated mercenary spyware since at least 2024. The activities of a shadowy outfit that the researchers dubbed DARK CARTOGRAPHER, which involves Discover-Tech and other vendors — including an unnamed U.S. intelligence contractor — date back to 2019.

“Digital advertising is broken. The way the online advertising ecosystem works today is a security threat for states, the private sector, civil society and everyone else alike,” Cristl said. “Cybersecurity agencies, regulators and lawmakers in the U.S., Europe and other regions must urgently step in. They must investigate the involved companies and fix the systemic risks that enable malicious ad targeting.”

Earlier reports have touched on the existence of mercenary spyware that can infect users through online ads, but Thursday’s research marks the first technical demonstration of infections and distribution through targeted advertising.

The Citizen Lab can’t currently attribute the AdFection attacks to any specific party.

Discover-Tech has appeared on lists of “certified” and “approved” vendors maintained by Google and IAB Europe, an advertising industry association. In response to the research, Google has removed Discover-Tech from its vendor registries and ended its access to Google ad platforms, while IAB Europe has removed Discover-Tech from its global vendor list.

Between March and June of this year, the researchers found Discover-Tech ads displayed in over 120,000 websites and over 70,000 mobile apps.

The Citizen Lab said that at least 45 devices at Al Jazeera were targeted in zero-click attacks that it linked with high confidence to Candiru spyware delivered by Discover-Tech’s ads.

Candiru spyware has shown the ability to take over a device remotely, steal data from it, access its microphone and camera, and more. Researchers discovered that in addition to Candiru, Discover-Tech has connections to another mercenary hacking firm, Bindecy, and a mercenary ad intelligence firm, Intelos.

Furthermore, the report states, “Discover-Tech operates a platform called Controlium that enables its mercenary surveillance partners to de-anonymize, fingerprint, and automatically infect devices the moment an advertisement is rendered.”

The DARK CARTOGRAPHER role is more mysterious.

“A separate threat actor we call DARK CARTOGRAPHER is using Discover-Tech’s infrastructure to exploit vulnerabilities across numerous mobile carriers to link device advertising IDs with phone numbers, mass-deanonymizing internet users. We will detail our findings concerning this threat actor in a separate forthcoming report,” Thursday’s report states. “Notably, DARK CARTOGRAPHER infrastructure links to both a mercenary adtech vendor and a U.S. government contractor. It is rare to see such direct overlaps between mercenary vendors and U.S. government or intelligence contractors.”

Discover-Tech, Candiru, Bindecy and Intelos did not respond to The Citizen Lab’s letters seeking comment.

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A group of European Parliament representatives are seeking to delay Serbia’s entry into the European Union and send other messages to Belgrade over the government’s usage of spyware.

The 29 members of the European Parliament (MEPs) cited a report this week from the SHARE Foundation about spyware found on the phones of Serbian student activists and that targeted others as well. The foundation, along with Amnesty International and The Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, discovered both Pegasus and NoviSpy spyware infections.

The groups didn’t assign responsibility for the Pegasus infection, but said evidence from the NoviSpy infections pointed to Serbian government authorities.

“This is not a technical glitch; it is a direct state attack on democracy,” the 29 MEPs wrote Friday. “With upcoming elections ahead, Aleksandar Vučić’s regime is using illegal digital surveillance to systematically dismantle political opposition.”

The MEPs’ demands include slowing Serbian accession into the EU until completing an investigation into Serbia’s spyware usage and making Serbia’s accession contingent on improving rule-of-law accountability.

They also said President Ursula von der Leyen should cancel a planned visit to Serbia. European leaders were already outraged by the response from Serbia to the death of former Bosnian Serb army commander and war criminal Ratko Mladic, with Enlargement Commissioner Marta Kos canceling her own visit Friday over the alleged “glorification” of Mladic.

The spyware letter adds to the pressure, said Hannah Neumann, an MEP who signed it.

“It could very well be that some of these demands will be honored, but for sure the spyware won’t be the only reason why,” she told CyberScoop. Serbia’s history of spyware use contributed to Friday’s letter, she said: “We have been critical towards the government for already quite some time and demanded consequences so this was another straw.”

The Serbian government did not respond to multiple requests late Friday for comment.

“Appeasement has failed,” the members wrote. “It is time for the Commission to demonstrate that compliance with fundamental democratic standards is a non-negotiable requirement, not an option.”

European Union member nations have faced their own allegations over using spyware, and recent revelations of spyware found on the device of a member of the European Parliament’s PEGA Committee has prompted some to renew calls for enactment of recommendations from that committee to address spyware abuses.

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Researchers say they have uncovered the first confirmed Pegasus spyware infection of 2026, as well as another spyware variant infection, targeting Serbian student activists and others in what one group called the largest documented wave of that kind of surveillance in the country to date.

The SHARE Foundation said Wednesday that it found 14 people targeted in all, including one member of parliament and a local government official. The University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab confirmed the Pegasus infection of a student activist with “high probability,” while Amnesty International confirmed that two devices had been infected with a new version of the NoviSpy spyware.

The SHARE Foundation noted that the infections coincided with the build-up to key local elections in March that were viewed as a test of the ruling Serbian Progressive Party, with student protests rising in the wake of the 2024 Novi Sad railway station canopy collapse, and in advance of October parliamentary elections.

Serbian activists have found themselves targeted with spyware numerous times before, including by Pegasus and NoviSpy. But the SHARE Foundation said this was the biggest wave there so far.

Spyware is noted for its ability to access everything on a device, record screens or take over its microphone.

NoviSpy variant infections

One NoviSpy variant infection came after authorities took a student’s phone during police questioning, and the same spyware was found on another device as well after private messages from the phone were disclosed by a media outlet that favors the ruling party, SHARE Foundation said.

The SHARE Foundation said signs point to Serbian police or secret service being behind the NoviSpy variant cases, with Amnesty International offering a similar assessment. 

“These new forensic findings show that Serbian student activists continue to be targeted with invasive spyware,” Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, head of Amnesty International’s Security Lab, told CyberScoop. “As with NoviSpy, which Amnesty International found used extensively in Serbia in 2024, the evidence suggests the infections are being carried out during detention by the Serbian authorities.”

Pegasus infection

In the case of the infection from NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, it’s rare for investigators to determine who specifically made use of it, although they found that the student’s device was hacked with a Pegasus zero-click exploit from December of last year to January of this year. The infection came via a zero-click exploit — meaning without victim interaction.

But Citizen Lab said the Serbian case harkens back to the first discovery of Pegasus a decade ago when it was against a pro-democracy activist, Ahmed Mansoor.

“Today, Pegasus is still being used to hack people campaigning for democracy,” said John Scott-Railton, senior researcher. “NSO spent a decade promising reform, yet their spyware is still an instrument of political repression.”

NSO Group maintains that its spyware is for usage against terrorism and crime, and that it halts any abuses it discovers.

The spyware discoveries in Serbia came after Apple sent threat notifications to the targets.

“Apple’s updates have broken this particular exploit, so we urge everyone to make sure they are updated to the latest version of iOS,” said Bill Marczak, senior researcher at Citizen Lab.

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In 2022 and 2023, the European Parliament’s PEGA Committee investigated spyware abuses across the European Union following journalistic revelations about government deployment of NSO Group’s Pegasus technology.

Now, years later, it turns out that someone was using Pegasus spyware on one of the committee’s own. 

In a report published Friday, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab revealed that it found Pegasus on the phone of substitute PEGA Committee member Stelios Kouloglou, a Greek journalist and former member of the European Parliament. It’s the first time a member of the committee has been publicly identified as a Pegasus victim.

For Kouloglou, the Pegasus infection was surprising. For another PEGA Committee member, it was fully expected, if delayed. For Citizen Lab, it was ironic.

For all of them, it was further evidence that much more needs to be done to prevent spyware abuses — such as enacting the very recommendations of the PEGA Committee’s final report that never saw action in the European Parliament.

Kouloglou told CyberScoop that he had run security tests on his phone prior to joining the PEGA committee in 2022, so he didn’t think anyone would be bold enough to try to infect his phone once he became a member. With Greece’s use of Predator spyware under scrutiny, “it would be a big scandal” if he was hacked while on the panel, he said.

But someone — Citizen Lab’s investigation didn’t uncover whom — infected Kouloglou’s phone with Pegasus twice, once around October of 2022 and once around March of 2023, investigators concluded with “high confidence.”

During the first infection, the committee was preparing for some prominent hearings and the first draft of its report. Kouloglou was in the hospital and got a visit from another Greek journalist who had testified before the committee and had himself had his phone infected with spyware earlier. Given the ability of spyware to listen to audio through an infected phone, it’s possible the infection ran afoul of protections for health data.

During the second infection, the panel was preparing for yet more hearings and “was engaged in intense discussions related to the final drafting process,” according to Citizen Lab.

The Citizen Lab investigation of Kouloglou’s came about this May, after he said a lawyer he knew told him there was a way to send his phone’s data to the research organization, during a time when Kouloglou was doing some investigative reporting and writing a “scandal of the week” column. “I said, ‘Why not? Let’s do it,” he said.

Whoever was responsible for infecting Kouloglou’s phone did so during “crucial moments” of the committee’s work, said Hannah Neumann, a member of the PEGA Committee and European Parliament member from Germany.

“Many of us were expecting some hacks during the committee, but it’s still frustrating now to figure out that it really happened,” she told CyberScoop. “When we decided to set up the Pega Committee, we really worked hard with our internal European Parliament IT security…  so that they can provide spyware checks for the members of the Pega Committee and their staff.”

Kouloglou and Neumann could only speculate on who was responsible. But for the two of them, and Citizen Lab, the motive seems clear.

“It is ironic that a member of the committee charged with investigating Pegasus was himself targeted with Pegasus spyware,” Ron Deibert, founder and director of Citizen Lab. “Someone, somewhere likely wanted to breach parliamentary privilege and find out what was going on in that committee. This case shows how the still unregulated and highly abused mercenary spyware industry is poisonous to democratic processes.” 

Kouloglou said he plans to pursue legal action against NSO Group. Many spyware victims have had difficulty winning lawsuits against spyware makers, although not all.

Israel-based NSO Group did not respond to a request for comment Thursday afternoon.

Neuman said the lessons learned as a result of Kouloglou’s phone infection include, “for members of national parliament and the European Parliament: Regularly get your devices checked. Apparently they don’t respect European democracy and parliamentarism.”

Most importantly, it’s time to enact the PEGA committee’s recommendations, she said.

“I don’t know how much more it needs for member states and the commission to wake up and actually start implementing the very good recommendations of our PEGA committee, because we all know that there is a spyware abuse,” Neuman said. “I don’t need to have another committee for that. I just need them to act.”

Kouloglou almost certainly won’t be the last member of parliament to get infected, said John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at Citizen Lab. Some had been infected prior to the work of the PEGA Committee, and some have been found to be targeted since. (The United States’ legislative body has been targeted in the past as well.)

“Providing highly secretive government agencies with surveillance tools supplied by unaccountable and often unethical mercenary firms is a recipe for the abuse of power,” he told CyberScoop. “I can tell you how the next chapter will go: more hacked Parliamentarians. In fact, I suspect there are members voting and attending high level meetings with no idea that their phone has been turned into a spy in their pocket.”

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