Israeli spyware firm NSO to pay Meta $168m. in damages for hijacking WhatsApp servers

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 Read More …

Apple notifies new victims of spyware attacks across the world

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 Read More …

Court document reveals locations of WhatsApp victims targeted by NSO spyware

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 Read More …

BADBAZAAR and MOONSHINE: Spyware targeting Uyghur, Taiwanese and Tibetan groups and civil society actors

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 Read More …

Again and again, NSO Group’s customers keep getting their spyware operations caught

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 Read More …

Data breach at stalkerware SpyX affects close to 2 million, including thousands of Apple users

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 Read More …

Amazon is still hosting spyware victims’ data weeks after breach alert

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 Read More …

New spyware found to be snooping on thousands of Android and iOS users

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 Read More …

Spyware maker caught distributing malicious Android apps for years

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. Read More …