Facebook sues Israeli company over WhatsApp spyware

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Facebook sued the Israeli hacker-for-hire company NSO Group on Tuesday in U.S. federal court for allegedly targeting some 1,400 users of its encrypted messaging service WhatsApp with highly sophisticated spyware.

The lawsuit filed in San Francisco is the first legal action of its kind, according to Facebook, involving a nearly totally unregulated realm.

He said that since discovering the malware operation in May, Facebook learned that the attackers were using servers and internet-hosting services previously associated with NSO Group, which has been widely condemned for selling surveillance tools to repressive governments. It said strongly encrypted platforms are used by pedophile rings, drug traffickers and terrorists and that NSO's technologies "provide proportionate, lawful solutions."

"This is huge. I am really glad to see a tech company put their massive litigation team on the field on behalf of users," tweeted Alex Stamos, a Stanford University researcher and former Facebook chief security officer. NSO's spyware has repeatedly been found deployed to target such people. Most notably, the spyware was implicated in the gruesome killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul last year and whose body has never been found.

 

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