Leaked documents, which are in the hands of The New York Times, indicate that two lawsuits have been filed against Israeli security firm NSO Group. The cases were allegedly brought by victims, who accuse the company of espionage.
The charges were filed in Israel and Cyprus, respectively, by a citizen of Qatar and a group of Mexican journalists and activists, the newspaper said. All of them would have been targeted by the company’s malware. The lawyer in the Israeli case told The New York Times that the indictment should make it clear that the law must catch up with technology and that spyware creators are complicit in the privacy violations it commits. NSO Group declined to comment on the charges against the newspaper. The company said in another statement that its products should only be used to combat terrorism and crime.
That would also have been the condition of NSO when it sold its products to Mexico, but according to the newspaper, human rights lawyers, journalists and activists were also targeted there. In the other case, documents would show that the company actively helped to compose texts of phishing messages that could be used to install malware on a device. It would also have helped to send the captured data.
The documents cite an example where leaders of the United Arab Emirates wanted proof from NSO that the product actually works. They therefore requested recordings of telephone conversations from the Emir of Qatar, from a Saudi prince and from a journalist. NSO would have come across four days later with two recordings of conversations of the journalist, who confirmed to The New York Times that he had had the conversations and that he was not aware that he was being watched.
The aforementioned malware would be the so-called Pegasus variant, which was discovered in 2016 thanks to human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor. In addition to an iOS version, which used three zero-days and could jailbreak a device after a click on a link, there was later also an Android version. It would have been used to attack 35 devices in Israel, Georgia, Mexico and Turkey. In July, news broke that a former NSO employee was trying to sell Pegasus for $50 million.