Mercenary spyware targeting reached three Turkish ministers on hardened, encrypted phones

The hardest claim to verify here is the reassuring one. A Turkish official told Middle East Eye that authorities believe the attempts to compromise the ministers' phones did not succeed ^[4]. The same account says that updating an iPhone's operating system can erase evidence that would otherwise help identify an intrusion ^[7]. It does not describe what the inspection found, name the tool, or identify the ministers ^[19].

Replacement works without that answer. It is the step both rounds of Turkish remediation have in common ^[18]. In 2021, after officials were targeted in suspected attacks involving Pegasus, they replaced their phones and changed their numbers to cut any possible connection to the spyware ^[13][16].

Attribution stops at the network layer. Traces that do survive typically point only to an IP address linked to a particular country, and that does not establish where an attack originated ^[8]. Sources in Ankara said a wide range of political and economic interest groups could plausibly be behind the attempt, and that pinpointing responsibility is notoriously difficult ^[11]. Suspicion in such cases often falls on countries including Israel and Greece, those sources said, though the tools have been sold to numerous governments across the region ^[12].

The official described the targeting as constant. Attempts against ministers, politicians, businesspeople and other prominent figures have become routine across the region, and officials now work on the assumption that they could be targeted at any moment ^[9]. "A specific reason isn't needed for these attacks, and we all have to be vigilant," the official said ^[10].

Pegasus, built by the Israeli firm NSO Group, has been documented exploiting flaws in Apple's iMessage to get onto a phone with no click from the user ^[13][14]. Apple has since introduced Lockdown Mode, a feature for users at high risk of targeted attacks ^[17]. The scale of the earlier campaign is on the record: Forbidden Stories, working with a consortium of 16 media organizations, reported in 2021 that government clients had selected more than 50,000 phone numbers worldwide as potential surveillance targets since 2016 ^[15].