The embattled Israeli spyware company notorious for its pervasive product with zero-click effect, Pegasus, NSO has been slapped with a $168 million punitive damages by a federal jury in California for hijacking the servers of WhatsApp in order to hack users, according to a report by Reuters. NSO was sued by Meta about six years ago.
It emerged in court that NSO 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. The executive said the ability to hack a phone outside the customer’s country was a separate add-on worth approximately $1 million or $2 million.
According to the report, Meta lawyer Antonio Perez told the court in his opening statement, “It is a highly sophisticated product, and it carries a hefty price tag.”
During the period, NSO was responsible for breaking into thousands of devices, according to Tamir Gazneli, NSO’s vice president of research and development. Gazneli however, disagreed with the idea that his company sold “spyware,” leading to an exchange with Perez in which Gazneli insisted his firm’s tools were used to gather intelligence on targets but “not people.”
But Perez asked him, “You don’t consider the targets people, Mr. Gazneli?”
“That’s not what I said,” he responded. “What I said is that the targets are intelligence targets of intelligence agencies,” Mr Gaznel retorted.
Court records also show that the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation collectively paid NSO $7.6 million. The agencies’ past dealings with the Israeli spyware company had previously been disclosed by The New York Times, which said the CIA financed Djibouti’s purchase of NSO spyware and the bureau bought it for testing, but the trial put a price tag on the relationship.
It further emerged during the court case that the lawsuit against the company did not deter it from continuing to abuse WhatsApp’s infrastructure, a court document filed late last month by Meta’s lawyers shows.
“NSO repeatedly targeted Plaintiffs, Plaintiffs’ servers, and Plaintiffs’ mobile client even after this litigation was filed,” the filing said.
The filing seeks a permanent injunction against NSO, which it said “poses a significant threat of ongoing and prospective harm” to Meta, its platform, and its users.
Privacy advocates and human rights organisations who have consistently criticised NSO for selling Pegasus to governments, consider the damages a win.
The Pegasus spyware uses the principle of ‘zero click’ to infect the devices of targets and can use a simple missed call to take over a target’s phone.
Pegasus can thoroughly take over any device by exploiting the security vulnerabilities in a device or app. It is able to take over Android, iPhone or Blackberry. Once it takes over a phone, it turns it into a secret camera and microphone and operate remotely, providing live feeds to the operator, and the owner of the phone would never know.
Pegasus then takes over the target’s emails, messages and GPS coordinates.
Ghana is a customer of NSO. The country’s purchase of the Pegasus spyware resulted in the jailing of some public officials for corruption, and Ghana’s purchase is currently a subject of corruption investigations in Israel.
By Emmanuel K Dogbevi
The post Court slaps Israeli spyware company NSO with $168m penalty for hacking WhatsApp appeared first on Ghana Business News.
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