Spyware firm targeted WhatsApp users in defiance of US court order, Meta says | WhatsApp
Meta said a spyware firm was targeting WhatsApp users with malicious links in violation of a US court order banning it from doing so.
Meta said in a post that WhatsApp “caught and blocked spear phishing attempts” from NSO Group; a spokesperson said the spokes targeted a handful of users in Jordan and Lebanon. The group was also caught creating “test accounts and groups” on WhatsApp.
NSO was founded in Israel but has been under US ownership since last year. He developed the Pegasus spyware, which at the time was one of the most powerful surveillance tools ever; This software exploited a vulnerability in WhatsApp to infiltrate users’ phones and collect all their data (messages, photos, calls and more).
Last year, he lost a lawsuit against Meta for using WhatsApp to target people; It was decided to pay 167 million dollars in compensation to Meta. A later case reduced This amount increased to $4 million, but NSO was granted a permanent injunction preventing it from targeting WhatsApp and its users.
Meta said the latest attacks showed that NSO violated this measure and asked the court to rule that the company did not comply with the decision.
“To me, it’s an astonishing signal of hubris for NSO to do this when they are permanently prohibited from doing so,” said John Scott Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, which investigates digital threats to civil society.
“It either refers to the fact that they think they won’t get caught, or they believe, rightly or wrongly, that they have a special way of avoiding facing the consequences of violating a U.S. federal permanent court order.”
Since the beginning of the Trump administration, reporting He suggested that NSO was looking for a way to enter the US market, and to do so to try To get off the U.S. commerce department’s “blacklist,” which bans it from doing business with U.S. companies without special approval.
It was placed there after the Biden administration determined that Pegasus had acted “contrary to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States” because of its widespread abuses.
The group appointed David Friedman, who was the US ambassador to Israel from 2017 to 2021 during Donald Trump’s first term, as its executive chairman last fall and hired a lobbying firm close to the US president.
“They are the poster child for the vigilante mercenary spyware industry. If they had chosen not to do so, their massive efforts to rebrand as an ethical spyware company looking to make big moves in the US market would have been more credible,” Railton said.
Earlier this year, Meta suggested that NSO was linked to a lawsuit against the company that claimed Meta could read users’ encrypted WhatsApp messages. The law firm that filed this lawsuit also represented NSO at the time.
There have been a handful of lawsuits making similar claims since then, including one in Israel and another filed by Texas attorney general Ken Paxton.
“WhatsApp cannot access people’s encrypted communications, and any claims to the contrary are false,” Meta spokesperson Rachel Holland wrote in a statement about the lawsuit.
NSO Group did not respond to a request for comment.
