Israeli company NSO Group is accused in lawsuit by Meta’s messaging app of spying on 1,400 users over a two-week period

Israeli company NSO Group is accused in lawsuit by Meta’s messaging app of spying on 1,400 users over a two-week period.

    • Synnr@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      51·
      8 months ago

      First sentence of the article:

      NSO Group, the maker of one the world’s most sophisticated cyber weapons, has been ordered by a US court to hand its code for Pegasus and other spyware products to WhatsApp as part of the company’s ongoing litigation.

      NSO Group has been ordered to hand over the Pegasus malware code that allows them to silently infect phones via WhatsApp, so Meta can fix it. This isn’t NSO Group being forced to hand over WhatsApp source code.

      There will be at most 5 software developers who have access to the code, on a non-networked machine, surrounded by a group of lawyers the entire time. No one will have the ability to leak the Pegasus code. After that, it will probably be handed to the random mormon-looking plainclothes guy nobody in the room can figure out, who will take it back to the NSA so they can scour it for any non-WhatsApp 0days they don’t already have.

      It’s worth noting that NSO Group is an Israeli company, as are many ‘legal’ entities of hacking software and hardware used by many nations.

      • Synnr@sopuli.xyzEnglish
        8·
        8 months ago

        Exactly this. There’s a massive difference between providing a product and laying it all out plainly in the terms of service, and providing a product to remotely hack phones through said service with no prior agreement by the user to be hacked.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    42·
    8 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    NSO Group, the maker of one the world’s most sophisticated cyber weapons, has been ordered by a US court to hand its code for Pegasus and other spyware products to WhatsApp as part of the company’s ongoing litigation.

    Hamilton did, however, decide in NSO’s favor on a different matter: the company will not be forced at this time to divulge the names of its clients or information regarding its server architecture.

    NSO was blacklisted by the Biden administration in 2021 after it determined the Israeli spyware maker has acted “contrary to the foreign policy and national security interests of the US”.

    While NSO does not disclose the names of its clients, research and media reports over the years have identified Poland, Saudi Arabia, Rwanda, India, Hungary and the United Arab Emirates as among the countries that have previously used the technology to target dissidents, journalists, human rights activists and other members of civil society.

    The Biden administration has raised alarms about the proliferation and abuse of products like Pegasus, saying they represent a potential threat to US national security and counterintelligence efforts.

    A new policy unveiled in early February will impose global visa restrictions on individuals who have been involved in the misuse of commercial spyware, including countries in the EU and Israel.

    The original article contains 535 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 60%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!