Italian prosecutors assert that the journalist was hacked using Paragon spyware

A journalist who was alerted by WhatsApp last year to a suspected spyware attack on his phone had indeed been hacked, Italian authorities have confirmed.

In a press statement sent to journalists on Thursday, the prosecutors’ offices in Rome and Naples, which are investigating the spyware scandal in the country, said that a technical report concluded that the journalist’s phones Francesco Cancellato And immigration activists Giuseppe Caccia and Luca Cassarini All of them showed traces of spyware infection in the “early hours” of December 14, 2024.

“The implementation of three consecutive attacks on the same night indicates that they may have been part of the same infection campaign,” the technical report said, according to the press release.

The full report has not yet been published.

This is the first independent confirmation that Cancelato, the administrator of the news site Fanpage, was hacked with spyware. In January 2025, Cancelato and about 90 other people, including journalists and members of civil society, Alert was received via WhatsApp They were targeted with spyware produced by Paragon Solutions, an Israel-based company It is now owned by the American private equity firm AE Industrial.

According to the press release, Italian judicial authorities searched the server of the Paragon spyware used by the intelligence agency AISI to target the phones of its targets. While the judicial authorities found evidence of operations against Caccia and Casarini, they did not find any evidence of an operation against Cancellato.

It remains unclear who hacked Cancelato’s phone.

By June 2025, an investigation by the Italian Parliamentary Committee for the Security of the Republic, known as COPASIR, had been conducted. He concluded that Italian intelligence agencies had lawfully targeted Caccia and CassariniBut the commission found no evidence of a hack against Cancellato.

Prosecutors’ offices said they would continue the investigation to determine the identity of the Cancelato hackers.

The Italian government, led by far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, He denied it Being behind the breakout on Cancelato. In response to a journalist’s question during a press conference in January, Meloni merely said that her government was “offering all its assistance and all the answers it can to help clarify this issue.”

The Italian government did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

“We ask for clarity,” Cancelato He said in an article Thursday. “We did not hear from the government, which remained silent whenever possible for a year, and when it did not remain silent, it lied.”

John Scott-Railton, one of the researchers at Citizen Lab who investigated the Paragon cases in Italy, said the new revelations about Cancellato’s hack “raise serious questions about why no confirmation has emerged in previous official investigations by Italian authorities.”

In response to the scandal, Paragon, whose spyware is called Graphite, She canceled her contracts With its clients from the Italian government.

Spyware scandals spread across Europe

Apart from Caccia, Casarini, and Cancellato, there were many more last the people in Italy who have been identified as targets of the spyware, including Ciro Pellegrino, who also works at Fanpage and He was alerted of a suspected attack on his iPhone by Apple last year. Researchers at Citizen Lab later concluded that Pellegrino It was hacked using Paragon spyware.

But the technical report cited by the prosecutor’s offices said it only found evidence of spyware on the phones of Caccia, Casarini and Cancellato, but not Pellegrino and four other alleged victims.

“I’m very upset,” Pellegrino, who said he had not yet seen the full technical report, told TechCrunch. “How could Citizen Lab, a spyware expert, have found evidence of Paragon’s Graphite on my phone, when the Italian plaintiffs’ experts did not? And why is Apple sending me alerts? For fun?”

The prosecutor’s offices in Rome and Naples did not respond to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for Polizia Postale, which is investigating the case, referred TechCrunch to the prosecutor’s offices.

The proverb that As of last year he had an active contract REDLattice, the company that merged with the spyware maker after its acquisition by AE Industrial, did not respond to a request for comment.

Italy is the latest European country in recent years to be involved in a spyware scandal, after similar cases in Greece, Hungary, Poland and Spain.

At the end of last month, A Greek court ruled over the Delian Hill Three other executives of spyware maker Intellexa were jailed for eight years on charges of illegal wiretapping and privacy violations.

The ruling was part of the “Greek Watergate” scandal, in which the Greek government was accused in 2022 of hacking into the phones of politicians, journalists, businessmen and military officials using Intellexa’s “Predator” spyware.