British officials are sounding the alarm over the widespread abuse of surveillance software and hackers-for-hire, saying that thousands of people were being targeted each year by an industry they described as posing an increasingly unpredictable threat.a report published on Wednesday
“There is another new front opening, as we see more and more adversaries able to buy and sell sophisticated cyber tools and spyware like Pegasus,” senior British minister Oliver Dowden told an NCSC conference in Belfast on Wednesday, referring to spyware made by Israel’s NSO Group. In a statement, NSO repeated its longstanding assertion that its technology was used “for the sole purpose of fighting crime and terror”.
Journalists and researchers have catalogued a string of other alleged abuses. On Tuesday, Canadian internet watchdog group Citizen Lab which said that NSO had been caught using newly discovered hacking tools to break into iPhones belonging to Mexican human rights defenders in 2022.