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.
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Source: The Jerusalem Post
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