WhatsApp sues Israel’s NSO for helping spies hack phones

WhatsApp sued Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group on Tuesday, accusing it of helping government spies break into the phones of roughly 1,400 users across four continents in a hacking spree whose targets included diplomats, political dissidents, journalists and senior government officials. In a lawsuit filed in federal court in San Francisco, messaging service WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook Inc, accused NSO of facilitating government hacking sprees in 20 countries.

WhatsApp said in a statement that 100 civil society members had been targeted, and called it “an unmistakable pattern of abuse.” NSO denied the allegations. “In the strongest possible terms, we dispute today’s allegations and will vigorously fight them,” NSO said in a statement. “The sole purpose of NSO is to provide technology to licensed government intelligence and law enforcement agencies to help them fight terrorism and serious crime.”

WhatsApp said the attack exploited its video calling system in order to send malware to the mobile devices of a number of users. The malware would allow NSO’s clients - said to be governments and intelligence organisations - to secretly spy on a phone’s owner, opening their digital lives up to official scrutiny. WhatsApp is used by some 1.5 billion people monthly and has often touted a high level of security, including endto-end encrypted messages that cannot be deciphered by WhatsApp or other third parties.

Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity research laboratory based at the University of Toronto that worked with WhatsApp to investigate the phone hacking, said that 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.” either Citizen Labnor WhatsApp identified the targets by name.