US said probing Israeli spyware firm NSO following WhatsApp lawsuit
The US Department of Justice is investigating the NSO group following a 2020 ruling that a lawsuit brought by WhatsApp against the Israeli spyware firm can go ahead, The Guardian reported Monday.
According to the report, lawyers from the Department of
Justice approached the messaging app with questions regarding the alleged 1,400
users targeted by NSO Group’s government clients in 2019.
WhatsApp is suing NSO Group, accusing it of using the
Facebook-owned messaging service to conduct cyber-espionage on journalists,
human rights activists, and others.
Tech giants Google, Microsoft, Cisco, and Dell in December
joined Facebook in a legal fight against the firm, filing a brief in an
American court accusing the NSO Group of having “powerful, and dangerous”
technology.
In early 2020 the FBI reportedly opened an investigation
against the company, but sources familiar with the matter told The Guardian it
had seemed to stall, until recent renewed interest in the case came from the
Department of Justice.
It remains unclear what stage the investigation is at, or
which suspected hacking targets they are looking into.
NSO Group told The Guardian it was not aware of an
investigation, while WhatsApp declined to comment.
NSO has been widely condemned for selling spyware to
repressive governments.
The Herzliya-based firm is best known for marketing Pegasus,
a highly invasive tool that can reportedly switch on a target’s cellphone
camera and microphone and access data, effectively turning the phone into a
pocket spy.
The company says it provides its software to governments for
the sole purpose of fighting terrorism and crime. But dissidents, journalists,
and other opposition figures have repeatedly claimed the company’s technology
has been used by repressive governments to spy on them.
NSO claims its software cannot be used on US numbers, but
according to Reuters, the FBI is investigating whether the company obtained
code from American hackers to infect smartphones.
In December, cybersecurity watchdog Citizen Lab reported
dozens of journalists at Al-Jazeera, a Qatari state-owned media company, were
targeted by advanced spyware, in an attack likely linked to the governments of
Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Most unnerving to the investigators was that iMessages were
infecting targeted cellphones without the users taking any action. Through push
notifications alone, the malware instructed the phones to upload their content
to servers linked to the NSO Group, Citizen Lab said, turning journalists’
iPhones into powerful surveillance tools without even needing to get users to
click on suspicious links or threatening texts.
The coordinated attacks on Al-Jazeera, which Citizen Lab
described as the largest concentration of phone hacks targeting a single
organization, occurred in July, just weeks before the Trump administration
announced the normalization of ties between Israel and the UAE, the archrival
to Qatar.
Emirati and Saudi authorities did not respond to requests
for comment.
The NSO Group cast doubt on Citizen Lab’s accusations in a
statement, but said it was “unable to comment on a report that we have not yet
seen.” The firm said it provides technology for the sole purpose of enabling
“governmental law enforcement agencies to tackle serious organized crime and
counterterrorism.” Nevertheless, it added, “when we receive credible evidence
of misuse… we take all necessary steps in accordance with our product misuse
investigation procedure in order to review the allegations.” NSO does not
identify its customers.
Prior to the December report, NSO’s spyware has repeatedly
been found deployed to hack journalists, lawyers, human rights defenders and
dissidents.
Most notably, the spyware was implicated in the gruesome
killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was dismembered in the Saudi
consulate in Istanbul in 2018, and whose body has never been found.
Several alleged targets of the spyware, including a close
friend of Khashoggi and several Mexican civil society figures, sued NSO in an
Israeli court over the hacking.
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