These special phone and app features can help protect you from spyware
Spyware attacks targeting journalists and activists have become increasingly common, with recent incidents involving Israeli spyware. Tech companies like Apple, Google, and Meta are now offering features to help users protect themselves from such threats. While no security measure is foolproof, these tools are recommended for anyone concerned about government surveillance.
- ▪In early 2025, WhatsApp notified around 90 users, including journalists, of targeted spyware attacks by Paragon Solutions.
- ▪Spyware can provide operators with full access to a target's device, allowing them to record calls, steal messages, and track locations.
- ▪Tech giants are implementing opt-in features to enhance user security against spyware, which can be easily enabled or disabled.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 16 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/23/you-dont-have-to-click-anything-to-get-hacked-anymore-heres-how-to-fight-back/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 23 May 2026 16:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-23T16:02:27.489Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-23T16:05:45.073Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | qY4g6Gi076vw · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Spyware attacks on journalists, human rights defenders, and political dissidents are no longer rare or exotic. In early 2025, WhatsApp notified roughly 90 users — many of them journalists and civil society members across Europe — that they had been targeted by Israeli spyware company Paragon Solutions. Months later, Apple sent threat notifications to a new group of iOS users; forensic analysis confirmed two of them, both journalists, had been hit with Paragon’s Graphite spyware using a zero-click attack, meaning they didn’t even have to tap a link to be compromised. These aren’t isolated incidents. They’re the norm.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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