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:
- Again and again, NSO Group’s customers keep getting their spyware operations caught
March 28, 2025
On Thursday, Amnesty International published a new report detailing attempted hacks against two Serbian journalists, allegedly carried out with NSO Group’s spyware Pegasus. The two journalists, who work for the Serbia-based Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), received suspicious text messages including a link — basically a phishing attack, according to the nonprofit. In one case, Amnesty ...
- Data breach at stalkerware SpyX affects close to 2 million, including thousands of Apple users
March 19, 2025
A consumer-grade spyware operation called SpyX was hit by a data breach last year, TechCrunch has learned. The breach reveals that SpyX and two other related mobile apps had records on almost 2 million people at the time of the breach, including thousands of Apple users. The data breach dates back to June 2024 but had ...
- Amazon is still hosting spyware victims’ data weeks after breach alert
March 13, 2025
Amazon will not say if it plans to take action against three phone surveillance apps that are storing troves of individuals’ private phone data on Amazon’s cloud servers, despite TechCrunch notifying the tech giant weeks earlier that it was hosting the stolen phone data. Amazon told TechCrunch it was “following process” after our February notice, ...
- New spyware found to be snooping on thousands of Android and iOS users
February 28, 2025
Hundreds of thousands of Android users, as well as several thousand iPhone users, have had their sensitive data compromised by a spouseware app, called Spyzie. The apps were found leaking email addresses, text messages, call logs, photographs, and other sensitive data, belonging to millions of people who, without their knowledge or consent, have had these apps ...
- Spyware maker caught distributing malicious Android apps for years
February 13, 2025
Italian spyware maker SIO, known to sell its products to government customers, is behind a series of malicious Android apps that masquerade as WhatsApp and other popular apps but steal private data from a target’s device, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Late last year, a security researcher shared three Android apps with TechCrunch, claiming they were likely ...
- Italian government denies Paragon has cut spyware contract
February 12, 2025
Italy denied on Wednesday that Israeli spyware maker Paragon had cut ties with Rome following allegations that the Italian government had illegally used its technology to hack the phones of critics instead of criminals. “Paragon has never suspended the service and has not terminated its contract,” the cabinet undersecretary for intelligence matters, Alfredo Mantovano, told reporters. ...