As you must have known that there were reports earlier that WhatsApp was used to spy on journalists and human rights activists in India previously this year. The surveillance was carried out with the help of a spyware tool termed Pegasus, which has been developed by an Israeli firm, known as the NSO Group.
WhatsApp Sues Israel’s NSO
The popular messaging platform WhatsApp has now confirmed that a spyware was being used by Israel based company NSO Group in order to spy on government officials, journalists, activists, lawyers, as well as several countries all around the world, comprising India as well.
On the other hand, the leading messaging service WhatsApp has also recently filed suit in federal court on Tuesday against the Israeli surveillance company NSO. The suit claim that the company acted illegally in helping governments to hack into the mobile devices of about more than 100 people around the world, which also comprises of journalists, human rights workers as well as women who had been the subject of online attacks.
The confirmation about the use of Pegasus spyware came previously this week after WhatsApp sued NSO Group. Apparently WhatsApp has warned many Indian users who are expected to be targets of the illegal snooping spyware.
In the meantime, there is not such confirmation on how many people were targeted in India. But, on the other hand, WhatsApp spokesperson has confirmed that there are few number of Indian users who were among those who may possibly have been a part of the cyber-attack that happened in the month of May.
WhatsApp also wrote in a blog post, “We sent a special WhatsApp message to approximately 1,400 users that we have reason to believe were impacted by [May 2019] attack to directly inform them about what happened.”
Talking about NSO Group, it is a Tel Aviv-based cyber-security company that specialises in “surveillance technology” as well as it claims to help governments and law enforcement agencies all over the world in order to fight crime and terrorism.
An NSO surveillance tool which is called Pegasus has also been associated in spying on Washington Post contributing writer Jamal Khashoggi in advance of the incident when he was killed by people affiliated with Saudi Arabia’s security services previous year.
Pegasus have the ability to access password-protected devices, being completely transparent to the target, without leaving any trace on the device, consuming negligible battery, memory as well as data so as to not detect suspicion in more alert users, a self-destruct mechanism in case of risk of disclosure, along with the ability to recover any file for deeper analysis.
Pegasus can also work on BlackBerry, Android, iOS (iPhone) and Symbian-based devices. Pegasus can be used for mass surveillance as well as it would seem likely that there are only selected individuals who would be targeted.
On Tuesday, WhatsApp sued the NSO Group in a federal court in San Francisco, accusing it of using WhatsApp servers in the United States and somewhere else “to send malware to approximately 1,400 mobile phones and devices (‘Target Devices’)… for the purpose of conducting surveillance of specific WhatsApp users (‘Target Users’)”.
The surveillance was also carried out “between in and around April 2019 and May 2019” on users in total of 20 countries across four continents, WhatsApp said in its complaint.
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