Facebook Tried To Buy Spyware Pegasus To Monitor Apple Users: NSO CEO
The CEO of Israel-based surveillance company NSO Group has
claimed that Facebook proposed to buy its malicious software Pegasus in 2017 to
snoop on Apple iOS users.
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”.
According to a report in Vice on Saturday citing court
documents, “it seems the Facebook representatives were not interested in buying
parts of Pegasus as a hacking tool to remotely break into phones, but more as a
way to more effectively monitor phones of users who had already installed
Onavo”.
Onavo Protect – a Facebook’s software that was going to get
the functionality — was billed as a piece of VPN software. Onavo was used
primarily to gather information about what other apps Facebook users were using
on their mobile devices.
“The Facebook representatives stated that Facebook was
concerned that its method for gathering user data through Onavo Protect was
less effective on Apple devices than on Android devices,” according to the
court filing.
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.
“Our lawsuit describes how NSO is responsible for attacking
over 100 human rights activists and journalists around the world,” the Facebook
spokesperson added.
NSO has maintained that it sells Pegasus only to
intelligence and law enforcement agency clients.
Apple last year forced Facebook to remove Onavo Protect from
the App Store.
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 to 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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