Amnesty International reported Thursday that the Serbian authorities employed Pegasus spyware against two investigative journalists in February 2025. Both journalists, from Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), have a research focus on state-sponsored corruption.

Both Serbian journalists received a Viber text on February 14 from an unknown number. The message contained a link, which Amnesty Security Lab concluded was an attempt to install Pegasus spyware on the journalists’ devices.

The journalists are members of BIRN, an award-winning network of investigative journalists who have been reportedly facing frequent threats and lawsuits by senior government officials for their work reporting on organized crime and corruption. At the time of receiving the Pegasus attack message, both of the journalists were working on reports regarding foreign investments and state-linked corruption cases, which included meeting with sources close to the government. The report concluded that the spyware operator was acting on behalf of the Serbian government.

This latest investigative report is the third time in two years Amnesty International found evidence that the Serbian authorities have been abusing highly invasive surveillance technologies to target their journalists. Rodoljub Sabic, Serbia’s former privacy commissioner said:

The illegal use of all these “tools” – when practiced by the authorities – is incompatible with the idea of the rule of law and violates multiple constitutionally guaranteed rights of citizens. From the perspective of media freedom and journalists’ rights, it is especially dangerous because it threatens one of the fundamental standards of journalism – the confidentiality of journalistic sources.

While the fundamental right to privacy is protected both under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the European Human Rights Law, a few other EU countries, such as Hungary and Poland have been accused of using Pegasus. This led a coalition of civil organizations to call on the EU to act against the threats to fundamental rights posed by spyware.

Pegasus is spyware designed to be covertly and remotely installed in mobile phones and has consistently been used by governments around the world to target journalists or surveil human rights activists. As a spying tool, once Pegasus is installed in a cellphone, it can access text messages and passwords, target the microphone and camera, track location, and harvest other information from other apps. In response to the report, the NSO Group stated that its products are only used to “investigate terrorism and crime.”