In 2016, Canadian research laboratory Citizen Lab reported that Emirati human rights advocate Ahmed Mansoor had been targeted with Pegasus the same year. He is the first proven victim of the spyware.
In 2018, The New York Times published an investigation detailing how the United Arab Emirates had used the spyware. According to the Times, the UAE had at that point used Pegasus for more than a year (the Emirati embassy in Washington D.C. did not respond to the Times’ request for comment).
In 2020, Citizen Lab detailed how 36 phones belonging to journalists, producers, anchors and executives at Al Jazeera, as well as the phone of one Al Araby TV journalist, were hacked with Pegasus by four operators, one of which the laboratory attributes to the United Arab Emirates.
In July 2021, the Pegasus Project revealed that Emirati Princess Haya bint Hussein as well as several individuals from her entourage were listed as potential targets using Pegasus by agents of the emirate of Dubai in early 2019, shortly before she fled Dubai. The number of Princess Latifa bint Mohammed Al Maktoum, another Emirati princess who fled Dubai in 2018, also appeared on the list. A British court confirmed a couple of months later that the emir of Dubai, Haya’s husband, had indeed hacked her phone using Pegasus.
The Pegasus investigation also disclosed that Russian-born French-Emirati multibillionaire and Telegram founder Pavel Durov was selected for potential surveillance with Pegasus. According to Le Monde, his phone was targeted by the United Arab Emirates when he moved his company to Dubai. Overall, the Pegasus Project identified more than 10,000 phone numbers likely selected by several customers in the United Arab Emirates for potential surveillance with Pegasus.
The Pegasus consortium partners also found that a UAE agency targeted the phone of Hanan Elatr, the wife of Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi, using Pegasus a couple of months before his assassination. In December 2021, The Washington Post confirmed that a UAE agency indeed hacked her phone using Pegasus.
A New York Times investigation from January 2022 explained that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the de facto Emirati leader, was offered the opportunity to buy Pegasus in 2013 as a way to pacify the relationship between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, and that Israel provided Pegasus licenses to the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in efforts to conclude the Abraham Accords, a 2020 diplomatic pact between Israel and several Arab countries.
In September 2022, Jamal Khashoggi’s wife, Hanan Elatr, announced she planned to sue NSO Group as well as the Saudi and Emirati governments in the U.S. over alleged surveillance attempts on her. The Washington Post reported in June 2023 that she had indeed launched a lawsuit in the U.S. against the Israeli firm.