Why WhatsApp Sued Israeli Firm?

WhatsApp sued the Israeli surveillance firm NSO Group on Tuesday, accusing it of a massacre involving diplomats, political dissidents, journalists, and senior government officials to help government spies break into the phones of some 1,400 users on four continents.

In a lawsuit in San Francisco federal court, WhatsApp, owned by Facebook Inc., accused NSO of hacking the government in 20 countries. Mexico, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain were the only countries identified.

WhatsApp said in a statement that 100 members of civil society had been targeted, calling it “a distinctive pattern of abuse”.

NSO denied the allegations.

“We deny today’s accusations and will vigorously fight them,” NSO said in a statement. “The sole purpose of NSO is to provide technology to licensed intelligence agencies and law enforcement agencies to help them fight terrorism and serious crime.”

How Whatsapp Sued Israeli Firm

WhatsApp said the attack exploited its video calling system to send malware to a number of users’ mobile devices. The malware would allow NSO customers – allegedly governments and intelligence organizations – to secretly spy on the owner of a phone and leave their digital life to official control.

Used by around 1.5 billion people a month, WhatsApp has often promoted a high level of security, including end-to-end encrypted messages that cannot be decrypted by WhatsApp or other third-party vendors. .Many People are Googling ‘How WhatsApp Sued Israeli Firm?’

The Citizen Lab, a research center for cybersecurity at the University of Toronto that worked with WhatsApp to investigate hacking, told Reuters they were well-known television personalities, prominent women exposed to online hate campaigns, and people who were confronted with “assassinations and threats of violence.”

Neither Citizen Lab nor WhatsApp identified the goals by name.

Governments are increasingly resorting to sophisticated hacking software as officials try to channel their surveillance skills to the remotest corners of their citizens’ digital lives.

Companies such as NSO claim that their technology enables officials to bypass encryption, which increasingly protects data stored on phones and other devices. However, governments rarely publicly speak about their abilities, which means that digital interventions, such as WhatsApp, usually take place in the dark.

Unprecedented Movement

Attorney Scott Watnik called WhatsApps a step “completely new,” stating that big service providers, fearing to “open the hood” and divulge too much about their digital security, tended to shy away from litigation. He said other companies would follow the progress of the suit with interest.

“It could certainly set a precedent,” said Watnik, who chairs the cybersecurity practice of the law firm Wilk Auslander in New York.

The lawsuit seeks to prohibit or attempt to block access to WhatsApp and Facebook services by NSO and seeks to cover unspecified damages.

NSO’s phone hacking software has already been involved in a number of human rights violations in Latin America and the Middle East, including a spy scandal in Panama and an attempt to spy on an employee of the London-based human rights group Amnesty International.

NSO has been given a particularly tough test for alleging its spyware played a role in the death of journalist Jamal Khashoggi of the Washington Post, who was murdered at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul just over a year ago.

Khashoggi’s friend Omar Abdulaziz is one of seven activists and journalists who brought the spyware company in Israel and Cyprus to justice for allegedly compromising their phones with NSO technology. Amnesty has also filed a lawsuit requesting that the Israeli Ministry of Defense revoke the NSO’s export license to “prevent state repression.”

NSO has recently sought to improve its image after being bought earlier this year by London-based private equity firm Novalpina Capital. In August, Shalev Hulio, co-founder of NSO, appeared on “60 Minutes” boasting that his spyware had saved “tens of thousands of people.” He did not disclose details.

NSO has also recruited a number of high-profile advisors, including former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge and Juliette Kayyem, an international security lecturer at Harvard University. Last month, NSO announced it would follow UN guidelines on human rights violations.

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News Source – Hindustan Times. Image – Aljazeera.com