Pegasus is a commercial surveillance software package developed by the Israeli firm NSO Group and sold exclusively to government clients. Its existence and capabilities were first definitively confirmed by Citizen Lab (University of Toronto) forensic analysis beginning in 2016. The 2021 Pegasus Project — a coordinated investigation by Forbidden Stories with Amnesty International and 80 journalists across 17 media organisations — documented over 50,000 phone numbers in a data leak, identifying journalists, human rights activists, lawyers, heads of state, and associates of murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi as apparent surveillance targets. NSO Group disputes characterisations of misuse; the US Commerce Department added NSO to its Entity List in November 2021; Apple and Meta both filed lawsuits against NSO. The surveillance capabilities are forensically confirmed; the scale of alleged misuse is documented; the specific authorisations for each target remain contested.