NSO Group is entirely responsible for operating Pegasus spyware, not the customers
New court documents in WhatsApp’s ongoing court battle against the Israeli spyware maker reveal details of the hacking operations.
Newly released, unredacted court documents have shed new light on the operations of Israeli spyware maker NSO Group.
According to unredacted statements from several NSO Group employees filed overnight by WhatsApp as part of its ongoing litigation against the company, NSO Group itself is responsible for operating its Pegasus spyware on behalf of its clients, not the clients themselves. , as previously thought. .
According to Josh Shaner, a former employee of NSO’s US-based subsidiary Westbridge, a customer “just needed to enter the target device number and hit Install, and Pegasus will install the agent on the device remotely without any commitment'”.
“The rest,” Shaner said, “is done automatically by the system.”
WhatsApp said in its presentation: “In other words, the client simply places a request for data from a target device, and NSO controls all aspects of the data retrieval and delivery process through its Pegasus design.”
Yaron Shohat, CEO and COO of NSO at the time Pegasus was used to infect the devices of 1,400 WhatsApp users in 2019, was also removed. According to WhatsApp’s filing, it admitted that “the actual process of installing Pegasus through WhatsApp was ‘a matter for NSO and the system to take care of, not a matter for customers to deal with.'”
This new twist is the latest revelation in the ongoing court battle between WhatsApp and NSO Group. In July, a series of leaked documents from Israel’s Justice Ministry revealed disturbing information about links between the Israeli government and spyware maker NSO Group.
The leaked data revealed that the Israeli Ministry of Justice seized the documents before they could be shared with the US court through the discovery process. The Ministry of Justice also enacted a gag order to keep the seizure secret.
According to the Forbidden Stories website, the leaked documents show “that in 2020, NSO’s legal team believed that confidential documents, such as its full list of clients, including ‘US clients,’ contracts or even information related to ‘the Jeff hack’ Bezos or The Khashoggi Murder could be among the files that could be included in the discovery.”
Donncha Ó Cearbhaill of Amnesty International’s Security Lab said at the time that the documents “call into question Israel’s commitment to impartially regulate NSO Group and cast doubt on its ability to provide justice, truth and reparations to those affected by “Pegasus spyware.”
