NSO Group
Defense Firm Said U.S. Spies Backed Its Bid for Pegasus Spyware Maker
A team of executives from an American military contractor quietly visited Israel numerous times in recent months to try to carry out a bold but risky plan: purchasing NSO Group, the cyber hacking firm that is as notorious as it is technologically accomplished. The impediments were substantial for the team from the American company, L3Harris, […]
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F.B.I. Told Israel It Wanted Pegasus Hacking Tool for Investigations
WASHINGTON — The F.B.I. informed the Israeli government in a 2018 letter that it had purchased Pegasus, the notorious hacking tool, to collect data from mobile phones to aid ongoing investigations, the clearest documentary evidence to date that the bureau weighed using the spyware as a tool of law enforcement. The F.B.I.’s description of its […]
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The Battle for the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon
The Mexico example revealed both the promise and the perils of working with NSO. In 2017, researchers at Citizen Lab, a watchdog group based at the University of Toronto, reported that authorities in Mexico had used Pegasus to hack the accounts of advocates for a soda tax, as part of a broader campaign aimed at […]
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Biden Administration Warns Against Spyware Targeting Dissidents
WASHINGTON — The federal government on Friday warned the public about the risks of commercial surveillance tools that have been used to spy on journalists and political dissidents by infecting their phones with malware. The warning, issued by the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, came after the Biden administration’s actions in November against the NSO […]
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Apple Sues Israeli Spyware Maker NSO Group
An opening for Apple’s lawsuit emerged in March, after NSO’s Pegasus spyware was discovered on the iPhone of a Saudi activist. Citizen Lab discovered that the spyware had infected the iPhone without so much as a click. The spyware could invisibly infect iPhones, Mac computers and Apple Watches, then siphon their data back to government […]
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