![]() ![]() Apple first found itself in NSO’s cross hairs in 2016, when researchers at Citizen Lab, a research institute of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, and Lookout, the San Francisco mobile security company now owned by BlackBerry, discovered that NSO’s Pegasus spyware was taking advantage of three security vulnerabilities in Apple products to spy on dissidents, activists and journalists.Īnd the company is at risk of default, Moody’s, the ratings agency, warned. ![]() Those developments helped pave the way for Apple’s lawsuit against NSO on Tuesday. The Israeli firm had argued that it “could claim foreign sovereign immunity.” A 3-to-0 decision by the court rejected NSO’s argument and allowed Facebook’s lawsuit to proceed. One week after the federal ban, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected NSO’s motion to dismiss Facebook’s lawsuit. NSO has said it would fight the ban, but the executive set to take over NSO Group quit after the business was blacklisted, the company said. The Israeli government, which approves any sale of NSO’s software to foreign governments and considers the software a critical foreign policy tool, is lobbying the United States to remove the ban on NSO’s behalf. The ban, which means that no American organization can work with NSO, is the strongest step any American administration has taken to bring the global marketplace for spyware to heel. This month, the Biden administration, in a notable breach with Israel, blacklisted NSO and Candiru, another Israeli surveillance company, saying they supplied spyware to foreign governments that used it to target the phones of journalists, dissidents, human rights activists and others. The NSO Group has dealt with a series of critical setbacks. “Pedophiles and terrorists can freely operate in technological safe-havens, and we provide governments the lawful tools to fight it.” “Thousands of lives were saved around the world thanks to NSO Group’s technologies used by its customers,” an NSO representative said in a statement Tuesday. “This is Apple saying: If you do this, if you weaponize our software against innocent users, researchers, dissidents, activists or journalists, Apple will give you no quarter,” Ivan Krstic, head of Apple security engineering and architecture, said in an interview on Monday. Since NSO’s founding in 2010, its executives have said they sell spyware to governments only for lawful interception, but a series of revelations by journalists and private researchers have shown the extent to which governments have deployed NSO’s Pegasus spyware against journalists, activists and dissidents.Īpple executives described the lawsuit as a warning shot to NSO and other spyware makers. Apple said it would donate the proceeds from those damages to organizations that exposed spyware. Apple also wants to permanently prevent NSO from using any Apple software, services or devices, a move that could render the company’s Pegasus spyware product worthless, given that its core business is to give government clients full access to a target’s iPhone or Android smartphone.Īpple is also asking for unspecified damages for the time and cost to deal with what the company argues is NSO’s abuse of its products. ![]() The lawsuit is the second of its kind - Facebook sued NSO in 2019 for targeting its WhatsApp users - and another consequential move by a private company to curb invasive spyware by governments and the companies that provide their spy tools.Īpple, for the first time, seeks to hold NSO accountable for what it says was the surveillance and targeting of Apple users. SAN FRANCISCO - Apple sued the NSO Group, the Israeli surveillance company, in federal court on Tuesday, another setback for the beleaguered firm and the unregulated spyware industry. ![]()
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