A federal jury in California handed Israel’s NSO Group a $168 million penalty on Tuesday for hijacking the servers of WhatsApp in order to hack users of the Meta-owned chat platform on behalf of foreign spy agencies.
The case caps a six-year battle between the American social media giant and the surveillance firm. It has also cast an unusual amount of light on the inner workings of the spyware industry. Between 2018 and 2020, NSO charged its European government customers a “standard price” of $7 million for use of its platform to hack 15 different devices at a time, according to Sarit Bizinsky Gil, NSO’s vice president of global business operations.
Read more…
Source: The Jerusalem Post
Sign up for our Newsletter
The latest news and insights delivered right to your inbox.
Related:
- Cocospy stalkerware apps go offline after data breach
May 19, 2025
A trio of phone surveillance apps, which was caught spying on millions of people’s phones earlier this year, has gone offline. Cocospy, Spyic, and Spyzie were three near-identical but differently branded stalkerware apps that allowed the person planting one of the apps on a target’s phone access to their personal data — including their messages, photos, ...
- Israeli spyware firm NSO to pay Meta $168m. in damages for hijacking WhatsApp servers
May 7, 2025
A federal jury in California handed Israel’s NSO Group a $168 million penalty on Tuesday for hijacking the servers of WhatsApp in order to hack users of the Meta-owned chat platform on behalf of foreign spy agencies. The case caps a six-year battle between the American social media giant and the surveillance firm. It has also ...
- Apple notifies new victims of spyware attacks across the world
April 30, 2025
Apple sent notifications this week to several people who the company believes were targeted with government spyware, according to two of the alleged targets. In the past, Apple has sent similar notifications to targets and victims of spyware, and directed them to contact a nonprofit that specializes in investigating such cyberattacks. Other tech companies, like Google ...
- Researcher uncovers dozens of sketchy Chrome extensions with 4 million installs
April 11, 2025
Google is hosting dozens of extensions in its Chrome Web Store that perform suspicious actions on the more than 4 million devices that have installed them and that their developers have taken pains to carefully conceal. The extensions, which so far number at least 35, use the same code patterns, connect to some of the same ...
- Court document reveals locations of WhatsApp victims targeted by NSO spyware
April 9, 2025
NSO Group’s notorious spyware Pegasus was used to target 1,223 WhatsApp users in 51 different countries during a 2019 hacking campaign, according to a new court document. The document was published on Friday as part of the lawsuit that Meta-owned WhatsApp filed against NSO Group in 2019, accusing the surveillance tech maker of exploiting a ...
- BADBAZAAR and MOONSHINE: Spyware targeting Uyghur, Taiwanese and Tibetan groups and civil society actors
April 9, 2025
MOONSHINE and BADBAZAAR are examples of trojans; they have malicious functions hidden inside an otherwise functioning app that can be downloaded from app stores or online file-sharing services. These apps are designed to trick a user into downloading and installing them on a device. Once an app is installed, it uses vulnerabilities on the device to ...