On Sunday, the first reports were published under the banner of the Pegasus Project, revealing the results of an investigation into how NSO Group’s military-grade spyware has been used to hack the smartphones of business leaders, heads of state, activists, journalists, politicians and more. The findings of this investigation, compiled by a consortium of media organizations across the globe, capture the implications of this commercially available spyware.

The mobile security of political candidates and their staff gets lost in the shuffle when discussing threats to our elections. However, a series of trends point to mobile espionage becoming the next major vehicle for electoral interference. These trends include:

• The smartphone’s rising importance in conducting the day-to-day business of a political campaign
• The increasing use of intrusive smartphone surveillance tools to target political officials
• A growing appetite by malicious outsiders to interfere in elections by any means necessary

In this mobile security blog post, I’ll discuss the reasons why smartphones may be the next electoral hacking target and the potential consequences of such a shift.