Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's office issued a statement denying it had spied on its own citizens, and saying it had referred the matter to the National Cybersecurity Agency.

On Thursday, citing an anonymous source, The Guardian reported Paragon had first suspended its contract with Italy on Friday after WhatsApp said it had disrupted a hacking campaign leveraging the Israeli startup’s spyware targeting around 90 people.

Meta Platforms warned a well-known Italian migrant rescue activist that he was recently targeted with spyware, according to a screenshot of the alert shared with Reuters, making it the second such case made public in Italy so far.