Facebook Accuses Israel’s NSO Group of Hacking 1,400 WhatsApp Users’ Data Last Year; Submits Detailed Proof in the Court
Facebook has submitted detailed proof in the court about the
Israeli company NSO Group and it's allegedly hacking into at least 1,400
WhatsApp users last year via its controversial surveillance software Pegasus.
According to The Jerusalem Post, Facebook's legal brief said "it was
exposing a massive NSO attack infrastructure operating in the US, in direct
contradiction of NSO's defenses, under the guise of third parties".
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According to Facebook, its attacks on WhatsApp users
"were hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) in the US and by the Californian
company QuadraNet (with a German provider)". Facebook asserted that NSO
had a contract with QuadraNet, using its server "more than 700 times
during the attack to direct NSO's malware to WhatsApp user devices in April and
May 2019."
Moreover, the legal brief listed "subdomains which were
all allegedly hosted on Amazon servers covering the dates of the attacks".
According to the report on Sunday, new revelations could make it harder for NSO
Group to continue to deny any US operations. NSO responded to the new Facebook
legal brief, saying that "Our products are used to stop terrorism, curb
violent crime, and save lives.
"NSO Group does not operate the Pegasus software for
its clients, nor can it be used against US mobile phone numbers, or a device
within the geographic bounds of the United States." NSO has denied the
allegations on WhatsApp hacking in the past. In counter-allegations, the CEO of
NSO Group has claimed that Facebook proposed to buy its malicious software
Pegasus in 2017 to snoop on Apple iOS users. FIR Registered Against Facebook
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In court documents filed during an ongoing lawsuit in which
Facebook has sued the NSO Group for snooping on WhatsApp users last year
including in India, NSO CEO Shalev Hulio claimed that "two Facebook
representatives approached NSO in October 2017 and asked to purchase the right
to use certain capabilities of Pegasus". A Facebook spokesperson said in a
statement that the NSO CEO is misrepresenting conversations between the company
and Facebook employees.
"NSO is trying to distract from the facts Facebook and
WhatsApp filed in court over six months ago. Their attempt to avoid
responsibility includes inaccurate representations about both their spyware and
a discussion with people who work at Facebook," the spokesperson said.
NSO has maintained that it sells Pegasus only to
intelligence and law enforcement agency clients. Facebook has even blamed
Apple's operating system for the hacking of Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos'
phone. Investigators believe that Bezos's iPhone was compromised after he received
a 4.4MB video file containing malware via WhatsApp -- in the same way when
phones of 1,400 select people including journalists and human rights activists
were broken into by Pegasus software from NSO Group last year. In an interview
with the BBC, Facebook's Vice President of Global Affairs and Communications,
Nick Clegg, has said it wasn't WhatsApp's fault because end-to-end encryption
is unhackable and blamed Apple's operating system for Bezos' episode. The NSO
Group has denied it was part of Bezos' hacking.
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