08/15/2022

Spyware Scandals Are Ripping Through Europe

The latest one rocked Greece

The text message that dragged Thanasis Koukakis into what's being called Europe’s Watergate scandal was so innocuous, he can barely remember receiving it. The Athens-based financial journalist received the note on his black iPhone 12 Pro on July 12 last year from a Greek number he didn’t have saved. That wasn’t unusual for Koukakis, who has spent the past three years investigating the changes the government has been making to financial crime regulation. He gets a lot of messages—both from numbers he’s saved and those he hasn’t. This one addressed him directly. “Thanasis,” it read, “Do you know about this issue?” Koukakis clicked on the link that followed, which took him to a news story about a Greek banking scandal. He replied with a terse: "No."

Koukakis, 44, did not think about the message until months later. In the days that followed, he was oblivious to the fact that the website that hosted the story he was sent had disappeared. He also did not know that by clicking on that link, he had opened an invisible door inside his phone, allowing spyware software called Predator to creep in to silently watch the messages and calls he was sending and receiving.

His phone kept working as if everything was normal, he says. Then, in December, Koukakis read a report about how Facebook parent company Meta had detected commercial spyware being used by customers in 10 different countries, including Greece. One of the links used to trick people into downloading the spyware was designed to look like CNN Greece—where he worked as an editor.

Please select this link to read the complete article from WIRED.