Kazakhstan

In July 2021, the Pegasus Project revealed that nearly 2,000 Kazakh numbers had been selected for potential surveillance with Pegasus, among them: 92 identified journalists, activists, businessmen, politicians and government officials, including former Prime Minister of Kazakhstan Bakhytzhan Sagintayev (the government did not respond to the consortium’s requests for comment).

In December 2021, Amnesty International’s Security Lab confirmed that the phones of four Kazakh politicians and political activists had been infected with Pegasus starting in June 2021. Three of them had previously been alerted by Apple about a possible “state-sponsored attack.”