WhatsApp takes Israel’s NSO to court for hacking phones around the world

WhatsApp sued Israel’s NSO group for hacking phones around the world, WhatsApp accused them of helping government spies to hack the phones of almost 1400 users in the four continents.

NSO Group is a technology firm in Israel which mainly focuses on cyber intelligence. According to the WhatsApp lawsuit, it has hacked into phones of political opponents of the Israeli government, diplomats, journalists and some of the senior government officials.

WhatsApp said the only three countries Mexico, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain got identified which got attacked by this. NSO denied all the allegation by the WhatsApp,

“In the strongest possible terms, we dispute today’s allegations and will vigorously fight them,” NSO said in a statement. “The sole purpose of NSO is to provide technology to licensed government intelligence and law enforcement agencies to help them fight terrorism and serious crime.”

WhatsApp got involved in this attack when the hackers used its video calling system to send the virus to the targeted person’s device. The virus allowed the government and its intelligence organizations to look into the device and use the collected data against them.

WhatsApp is owned by Facebook and it claims that their service is protected and the conversation between two users is end-to-end encrypted. To provide high-level security it is in a partnership with Citizen Lab, which is a research laboratory for cybersecurity based at the University of Toronto.

Citizen Lab told Reuters “the targets included well-known television personalities, prominent women who had been subjected to online hate campaigns and people who had faced assassination attempts and threats of violence.”