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The president of Mexico has vowed to open an investigation into reports that members of the previous government had bought Israeli spying software and had used it to spy on the country's current socialist leader, among others.

In a speech on Tuesday, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador labeled allegations that the previous administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto spied on him and his associates as "shameful."

"They had sophisticated equipment to listen to all phone calls, not only from the person who was the target, but from everyone around them," he claimed, adding that it wasn't just him they allegedly spied on, but his wife, children, doctor and dozens more.

The Guardian reported that as many as 50 of Lopez Obrador's closest allies were targeted by the previous administration, which was the first purchaser of the Pegasus software.

The news outlet said that the data it received showed the phone numbers of priests, victims of state-sponsored crimes and the children of high-profile figures among those targeted by the spyware, challenging NSO's claims that the technology was only used to fight serious crime and terrorism.

Amazon has pulled the plug on infrastructure and other services that it offered to Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group.The tech and retail giant announced on Monday that it had deactivated cloud computing accounts linked to NSO Group. The Israeli company reportedly used Amazon Web Services (AWS) to operate the spyware programs that it marketed to governments around the world.

It's believed that the digital surveillance software - which is reportedly capable of accessing and recording texts, videos, photos and web activity, and can even log passwords used on the device - may have been used by foreign governments to target as many as 50,000 people, including business executives, religious figures, academics, NGO workers, presidents and prime ministers.

"When we learned of this activity, we acted quickly to shut down the relevant infrastructure and accounts," an AWS spokesperson said.

NSO Group disputed that AWS had shut down its accounts, prompting Amazon to double down.

"We shut down the infrastructure referenced in this report that was confirmed to be supporting the reported hacking activity, in accordance with our terms of use," a spokesperson for the company reiterated.

Amnesty's analysis of 67 smartphones allegedly targeted by Pegasus found evidence of successful infection on 23 devices and signs of attempted infiltration on 14 others. The NGO also claimed that NSO's malware sent information "to a service fronted by Amazon CloudFront, suggesting NSO Group has switched to using AWS services in recent months."

Citizen Lab, a group at Toronto University that has been tracking Pegasus for years, said in a peer review of Amnesty's finding that it had "independently observed NSO Group begin to make extensive use of Amazon services including CloudFront in 2021." CloudFront is an Amazon service that allows clients to securely deliver data using high transfer speeds.

Amazon was less proactive when media reports revealed in May 2020 that the Israeli firm may have used Amazon infrastructure to deliver malware to unsuspecting victims.

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