WhatsApp claimed a legal victory against the maker of the Pegasus spyware on Friday.
The Israeli company, NSO Group Technologies, is accused in a lawsuit of Meta’s messaging app that infected and surveyed the phones of 1,400 people in a two-week period in May 2019 through the famous Pegasus software.
The judge in the case, Phyllis Hamilton, found that the company violated US state and federal hacking laws as well as WhatsApp’s own terms of service.
NSO Group will face a separate jury trial in March 2025 to determine the damages it owes to WhatsApp, the world’s most popular messaging service.
WhatsApp said in a statement: “After five years of litigation, we are grateful for today’s decision. The NSO can no longer avoid responsibility for their unlawful attacks on WhatsApp, journalists, activists of human rights and civil society. In this decision, the spyware companies should note that their illegal actions will not be tolerated.”
NSO Group did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a summary judgment, the judge found NSO Group in violation of the US Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Apple filed a similar lawsuit against the company but dropped it in September.
The NSO Group has been dragging its feet throughout the litigation, according to the judge’s ruling. Hamilton ordered the NSO Group to provide WhatsApp with the source code of its spyware by early 2024. In his ruling on Friday, however, he said the company has repeatedly failed to comply, a major reason that he granted WhatsApp’s request for sanctions against the company.
Although the case was filed in California, the NSO Group made the source code available to be seen in Israel only by an Israeli citizen, which the judge called “impossible”, according to the decision.
The NSO Group has repeatedly said its government clients control Pegasus’ use and are responsible for the hacking it does, but filings in the case show that’s not true. The company was shown to be the party that “installed and extracted” information on Pegasus, which was used to infiltrate not only WhatsApp but also iPhones to retrieve photos, emails and texts.
Among the victims of the hack identified by Meta are senior government officials, journalists, human rights activists, political dissidents and diplomats. Joe Biden’s administration put NSO Group on the blacklist in 2021 and prohibited US government agencies from buying its products. Pegasus has been involved in hacking government authorities around the world.
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2024-12-21 20:31:00
