Artemis Seaford, a former trust and safety manager at Meta, was placed on a wiretap by the Greek national intelligence service and was also spied on using the notorious Predator spyware, The New York Times reported on March 20. Seaford, who is a dual Greek-U.S. citizen, worked for Meta from 2020 to 2022 and lived partly in Greece during that period. She first suspected that she may have been hacked when her name featured on a leaked list of spyware targets in November 2022, following which she sent her phone for examination to researchers at Toronto's Citizen Lab, who confirmed that her phone was infected with Predator. Why does this matter? As pointed out by The New York Times, this is the first reported instance of a US citizen being targeted in a European country using the Predator spyware, which is already being subjected to a lot of criticism in Greece. Additionally, this incident "demonstrates that the illicit use of spyware is spreading beyond use by authoritarian governments against opposition figures and journalists, and has begun to creep into European democracies, even ensnaring a foreign national working for a major global corporation," the report stated. What is the Predator spyware? Like the infamous Pegasus spyware made by Israel-based NSO Group, Predator gives hackers complete control and surveillance over infected devices including the ability to monitor calls, messages, photos, etc. It is reportedly made by a North Macedonia-based company called Cytrox and is being exported around the world to governments or government-backed threat actors. Last year,…
