Technology|Israeli Firm Tied to Tool That Uses WhatsApp Flaw to Spy on Activistsfirst reported Monday by The Financial Times.The products of the NSO Group, which operated in secret for years, were found in 2016 as part of a spying campaign on the iPhone of a now-jailed human-rights activist in the United Arab Emirates through undisclosed Apple security vulnerabilities. Since then, the NSO Group’s spyware has been found on the iPhones of journalists, dissidents and even nutritionists.The company has long advertised that its products are sold to government agencies solely for fighting terrorism and aiding law enforcement investigations.
The NSO Group said in a statement on Monday that its spyware was strictly licensed to government agencies and that it would investigate any “credible allegations of misuse.” The company said it would not be involved in identifying a target for its technology, including the lawyer at the center of the latest accusations.NSO’s response is consistent with previous responses from the Israeli firm, which claims to have an in-house ethics committee that decides whether or not to sell to countries based on their human-rights records.But increasingly, NSO’s spyware has been discovered in use by governments with questionable human-rights records like the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Mexico.The Israeli company sold a stake to Novalpina, a British private equity firm, in a leveraged buyout deal last year that valued it at nearly $1 billion.The firm has been on a public-relations campaign in recent months to show its value to law enforcement, and has cited several examples of its spyware’s being used, it says, to capture drug kingpins and to stop terrorist attacks.“NSO and Novalpina have spent several months telling the world that there are adults in the room and telegraphing that they have made a commitment to close oversight,” said John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab. “Yet even 24 hours ago, we observed what some believe to be an NSO infection attempt against a human-rights lawyer.“As this case makes it very clear — if indeed this was NSO — there is still a very serious abuse problem,”
Mr. Scott-Railton added.Correction: May 14, 2019An earlier version of this article misstated the country from which a lawyer received telephone calls at odd hours. The calls came from Sweden, not Norway.Nicole Perlroth reported from San Francisco, and Ronen Bergmen from Lima, Peru. Interested in All Things Tech? Get the Bits newsletter for the latest from Silicon Valley and the technology industry. And sign up for the personal technology newsletter for advice and tips on the technology changing how you live.A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Israeli Firm
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