Pakistan develops ‘Beep Pakistan’ communication application for secure communication for government employees and officials, confirmed Ministry of Information Technology and Telecommunications.
According to Aminul Haq – Federal Minister of Information Technology and Telecommunications, the application is under development and will provide a secure communications platform to government employees and officials as it will be safe from hacking and other spyware tools.
Ministry of IT and Telecom has said that initially, this application will provide the facility of text messages and audio calls, whereas the video call feature will be added later.
Utmost effort has been made to ensure the security of the application to prevent the leak of important chats/conversations between government officials and employees, said the federal minister.
Government servants will be obligated to use this application for communication which is currently undergoing in-house tests and trials.
The development comes as earlier it was reported that Israeli spyware ‘Pegasus’ was used by India in an attempted hacking of PM Imran Khan’s cellphone.
As reported by an independent Israeli publication Haaretz, several Pakistani officials, Kashmiri freedom fighters, Indian Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, and even an Indian supreme court judge had been targeted.
The leak consists of more than 50,000 smartphone numbers believed to have been identified as connected to people of interest by NSO clients since 2016, the news outlets reported, although it was unclear how many devices were actually targeted or surveilled.
On the list were 15,000 numbers in Mexico — among them reportedly a number linked to a murdered reporter — and 300 in India, including politicians and prominent journalists. The Washington Post stated that India was one of the 10 countries listed as a client of the Pegasus malware.
Following the development, a high-level meeting of the civil and military leadership had been called which would decide a future course of action against India’s spying attempt.
