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:
- Internet surveillance firm Sandvine says it’s leaving 56 ‘non-democratic’ countries
September 20, 2024
Sandvine, the makers of surveillance-ware that allowed authoritarian countries to censor the internet and spy on their citizens, announced that it is leaving dozens of “non-democratic” countries as part of a major overhaul of the company. The company, which was founded in Canada, published a statement on Thursday, claiming that it now wants to be “a ...
- President Urges Colombians to Check Their Phones for Pegasus Spyware
September 10, 2024
“Anyone who suspects illegal infection of their phones can consult this page or use the government service we will provide. I urge young people, especially those connected to youth leaders who disappeared or died during the strike, to use these services,” he stated on X. Last week, Petro revealed that the police purchased the Israeli company ...
- US sanctions fail to deter Predator spyware utilization
September 6, 2024
Intellexa Group’s Predator spyware has experienced a resurgence in activity following a decline spurred by sanctions imposed by the Biden administration, reports The Record, a news site by cybersecurity firm Recorded Future. Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is a new Intellexa client, may have leveraged new Predator infrastructure to enable spyware staging and ...
- State-backed attackers and commercial surveillance vendors repeatedly use the same exploits
August 29, 2024
Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) observed multiple in-the-wild exploit campaigns, between November 2023 and July 2024, delivered from a watering hole attack on Mongolian government websites. The campaigns first delivered an iOS WebKit exploit affecting iOS versions older than 16.6.1 and then later, a Chrome exploit chain against Android users running versions from m121 to m123. ...
- Greece leaves spy services unchecked on Predator hacks
August 7, 2024
Greece’s 2022 espionage scandal dubbed “Predatorgate” had everything: eavesdropping on politicians, journalists and judges, exports of shady software to dictatorial regimes and high-profile resignations. Fast-forward two years and everyone in government is off the hook. In a 300-page report seen by POLITICO, deputy prosecutor of the Supreme Court Achilles Zisis argued that a series of controversial ...
- LianSpy: new Android spyware targeting Russian users
August 5, 2024
In March 2024, Kaspersky researchers discovered a campaign targeting individuals in Russia with previously unseen Android spyware they dubbed LianSpy. Kaspersky analysis indicates that the malware has been active since July 2021. This threat is equipped to capture screencasts, exfiltrate user files, and harvest call logs and app lists. The malicious actor behind LianSpy employs multiple ...