Pegasus spyware: Bhima-Koregaon activists’ lawyer got warning from WhatsApp

Over the last two years, Nagpur-based human rights lawyer Nihalsing Rathod has received receiving calls on WhatsApp from unknown numbers. These calls would be made from international numbers, and would invariably turn out to be a group call.

The moment Rathod answered them, the call would disconnect. He assumed these were innocuous calls made to his number but as a safety measure, reported each of the “suspicious calls” to WhatsApp.

On October 7, 2019, Rathod, however, was contacted by a senior researcher from the Toronto University’s CitizenLab informing him that he faced a “specific digital risk”.

“John Scott-Railton, the senior researcher told me that his lab had followed my work and during their research had found out that my profile was under a surveillance attack. All those calls made to me for two years suddenly began to make sense,” Rathod told The Wire.