The Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, was also spied on with Pegasus, as were the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles. The attack on his mobile phone occurred between June 7, 2021 and the 26th of the same month, when the diplomatic crisis between Spain and Morocco was at its height. The authors of the espionage managed to steal six gigabytes of information from the terminal belonging to the Minister of the Interior, as confirmed by La Vanguardia from government sources.
In terms of the volume of information stolen, the computer attack on Marlaska is the most serious of the public events by the Government after the espionage of more than 60 independence leaders came to light: Sánchez was robbed of 2.7 gigabytes of information and to Robles only 9 megabytes. All of them have been detected almost a year after the interference with the virus of an Israeli company took place.
Last week it was leaked that the mobile of the former magistrate of the National High Court had also been infected, but from the Interior they have been maintaining that they had not been informed of the results of the analysis carried out by the Cryptological Center, which depends on the Ministry of Defense.
However, Interior sources already warned of concern about the “huge flaw” in cybersecurity that allowed Government phones to be infected —and it took more than a year to detect it—.
The government spokeswoman, Isabel Rodríguez, has also confirmed that on those dates there was also an attempt to infect the terminal of the Minister of Agriculture, Luis Planas, who was the Spanish Ambassador to Morocco for six years during the government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero.
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