WhatsApp sues Israeli surveillance firm for allegedly helping spies hack phones around the world – World

WhatsApp sued the Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group on Tuesday, accusing it of helping government spies enter the phones of approximately 1,400 users on four continents in a wave of piracy whose objectives included diplomats, political dissidents, journalists and senior officials. government.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco, the WhatsApp messaging service, owned by Facebook Inc., accused NSO of facilitating government piracy in 20 countries. Mexico, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were the only countries identified.

WhatsApp said in a statement that 100 members of civil society had been attacked, and described it as an unmistakable pattern of abuse.

NSO denied the accusations.

"In the strongest possible terms, we dispute today's accusations and we will fight vigorously against them," NSO said in a statement. "The sole purpose of NSO is to provide technology to government intelligence and law enforcement agencies licensed to help them fight terrorism and serious crimes."

WhatsApp said the attack exploded its video calling system to send malware to the mobile devices of several users. The malware would allow NSO customers, who are said to be governments and intelligence organizations, to secretly spy on the owner of a phone, opening their digital lives to official scrutiny.

WhatsApp is used by some 1.5 billion people monthly and has often promoted a high level of security, including end-to-end encrypted messages that WhatsApp or other third parties cannot decipher.

Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity research laboratory based at the University of Toronto that worked with WhatsApp to investigate phone hacking, said Reuters The targets included well-known television personalities, prominent women who had been subjected to online hate campaigns and people who had faced assassination attempts and threats of violence.

Neither Citizen Lab nor WhatsApp identified the objectives by name.

Governments have increasingly turned to sophisticated piracy software as officials seek to bring their surveillance power to the most remote corners of their citizens' digital lives.

Companies like NSO say their technology allows officials to bypass encryption that increasingly protects data stored on phones and other devices. But governments rarely talk about their capabilities publicly, which means that digital intrusions such as those that affected WhatsApp generally occur in the shadows.

Unprecedented movement

Lawyer Scott Watnik called the WhatsApp movement "completely unprecedented," explaining that the main service providers tended to avoid litigation for fear of "opening the hood" and revealing too much about their digital security. He said other companies would be watching the progress of the demand with interest.

"It could certainly set a precedent," said Watnik, who chairs the cybersecurity practice at the Wilk Auslander law firm in New York.

The lawsuit seeks that NSO cannot access or attempt to access WhatsApp and Facebook services and seeks unspecified damages.

NSO's phone hacking software has already been implicated in a series of human rights abuses in Latin America and the Middle East, including an espionage scandal in Panama and an attempt to spy on an employee of the rights group based in London Amnesty International.

NSO was subject to particularly hard scrutiny over the accusation that its spyware played a role in the death of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul just over a year ago.

Khashoggi's friend, Omar Abdulaziz, is one of seven activists and journalists who have taken spyware to the courts in Israel and Cyprus for accusations that their phones were compromised with NSO technology.

Amnesty also filed a lawsuit, demanding that the Ministry of Defense of Israel revoke the NSO export license to "prevent it from benefiting from state-sponsored repression."

NSO recently attempted to clear its image after it was bought by London-based private equity firm Novalpina Capital earlier this year. In August, NSO cofounder Shalev Hulio appeared in 60 minutes of CBS and he boasted that his spyware had saved "tens of thousands of people." He did not provide details.

NSO has also brought a number of high-profile advisors, including former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge and Juliette Kayyem, a senior professor of international security at Harvard University. Last month, NSO announced that it would begin complying with the United Nations guidelines on human rights abuses.