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Italian authorities have confirmed that a journalist who was alerted by WhatsApp last year about a suspected spying problem on his phone has been hacked.
In a press release sent on Thursday to the press, the offices of public prosecutors in Rome and Naples, which are investigating espionage in the country, said that a technical report confirmed that the calls of the journalist. Francesco Canellato and immigration activists Giuseppe Caccia and Luca Casarini all indicated that they were infected with spyware “in the early hours” of December 14, 2024.
“The killing of three terrorists in a row that night suggests that they may have been involved in the same incident,” the technical report said, according to the press release.
The full report has not been made public.
This is the first independent confirmation that Canellato, who is the director of the news website Fanpage, was hacked by spyware. In January 2025, Cancellato and about 90 other people, including journalists and government agencies, was informed by WhatsApp that they were targeted by spyware developed by Paragon Solutions, an Israeli company which is now owned by the American company Equity AE Industrial.
According to a press release, Italian prosecutors have visited the Paragon spyware server used by the AISI intelligence agency to target phone calls. Although the jury found evidence of the events against Caccia and Casarini, they did not find evidence of Cancellato’s operation.
It is not known who hacked Cancellato’s phone.
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As of June 2025, an investigation by the Italian Parliamentary Committee for the Defense of the Republic, known as COPASIR, confirmed that the Italian law enforcement agencies had officially pursued Caccia and Casarinibut the committee found no evidence against Cancellato.
The prosecutor’s office said it would continue its investigation to find out who robbed Canellato.
The Italian government, led by right-wing Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, he refused stay back hack on Cancellato. In response to the reporter’s question at a press conference in January, Meloni simply said that his government is “providing all the help and all the answers it can give to clarify this issue.”
The Italian government did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
“We want to make it clear,” Cancellato said in another article Thursday. “And we have not received it from the government, which has been silent after a year if possible.
John Scott-Railton, one of the Citizen Lab researchers who investigated the Paragon cases in Italy, said the new revelations about Canellato’s hacking “raise serious questions about why the Italian authorities did not confirm what happened earlier.”
In response to the insult, Paragon, whose spy is named Graphite, terminated his contracts and its clients the Italian government.
The evils of espionage spread throughout Europe
Besides Caccia, Casarini, and Cancellato, there were several other people in Italy who have been identified as espionage targets, including Ciro Pellegrino, who also works for Fanpage and was notified of the attack on his iPhone by Apple last year. Researchers at Citizen Lab later confirmed that Pellegrino was hijacked by Paragon’s spyware.
A technical report cited by the prosecutor’s office, however, said it only found evidence of spyware on the phones of Caccia, Casarini, and Canellato, but not Pellegrino and the other four suspected victims.
“I’m disappointed,” Pellegrino, who said he hadn’t seen the full technical report, told TechCrunch. “How is it possible that Citizen Lab, an anti-spyware watchdog, found evidence that Paragon’s Graphite was on my phone, while Italian prosecutors did not? And why would Apple send me the information? Interesting?”
The prosecutor’s offices in Rome and Naples did not respond to requests for comment.
A spokesperson for the Polizia Postale, which is investigating the matter, referred TechCrunch to the prosecutor’s office.
Paragon, who like last year he had an active contract and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and REDLattice, the company that joined the spyware maker after it was acquired by AE Industrial, did not respond to requests for comment.
Italy is the latest European country to be hit by espionage scandals in recent years, following similar cases in Greece, Hungary, Poland, and Spain.
At the end of last month, the Greek court sentenced Tal Dilian and three other executives of the spy software maker Intellexa have been jailed for eight years for breach of contract and breach of privacy.
The verdict was part of the “Greek Watergate” scandal, in which the Greek government was indicted in 2022 for hacking the phones of politicians, journalists, businesses, and military officials with Intellexa’s Spyware Predator.
