Espionage software from the Israeli cybersurveillance company NSO has been found on the iPhones of eleven employees of the US State Department. Report that American media.
It concerns both American and local employees of the department, all in Uganda. who received a warning from iPhone maker Apple that their devices were hacked by state-sponsored attackers. It is unclear who is behind the hack. NSO claims that its Pegasus spyware program – which makes it possible to take over a telephone completely unnoticed – is available to intelligence and investigation services for the fight against serious crime and terrorism.
It is the first time that American diplomats are known to have been victims of the Pegasus software. White House spokesman Jen Psaki said on Friday in a press reaction that software from companies like NSO “poses a serious threat to the safety of US government personnel.”
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French government
NSO’s activities came under the spotlight last summer, when a consortium of seventeen media companies unveiled a list of more than 50,000 possible targets for Pegasus customers. It included heads of state and government, human rights activists, business people and journalists, although it was not always demonstrable that their devices had actually been hacked. The list included Hungarian journalists, Indian opposition politicians, people from the entourage of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who was assassinated in 2018, and French President Macron and much of his cabinet.
Read also The Israeli government is cornered by the Pegasus revelations
Those revelations were painful not only for NSO, but also for the Israeli government, which maintains close ties to the local cybersecurity sector. Many NSO employees have a history with the Israeli intelligence services, and the technology of NSO and its peers may only be sold with an export license from the Israeli Ministry of Defense.
According to the Israeli business newspaper Calcalist In response to the affair, the ministry recently narrows the list countries to which cybersurveillance technology may be sold. Of the 102 countries, 65 were scrapped, including Saudi Arabia and Hungary.
Lawsuits
Since the revelations about Pegasus, the problems for NSO have been mounting: the US government, along with industry peer Candiru, placed the company on its sanctions list last month, barring it from access to US technology, a move that was also seen as a significant step. tap the fingers of the Israeli government.
Last month, Apple also filed a lawsuit against NSO, as did Meta, the parent company of Facebook and WhatsApp. According to credit rating agency Moody’s, NSO is in dire straits: it even warned that the company might soon be unable to meet its payment obligations.
NSO writes in a Friday published statement on his website that the hack in Uganda would violate its terms of use, and that it has shut down all customers of its services pending its own investigation into the allegations that could potentially be related to the case. According to NSO, however, there is as yet no evidence that software from the company was used in the hack.
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