NSO to block some government clients from using its spyware over global spy scandal

Israeli spyware company NSO Group has temporarily blocked several government clients around the world from using its technology as the company investigates accusations of spy, a company employee told NPR on Thursday.

“There is an investigation into some clients. Some of those clients have been temporarily suspended,” said a source in the company, who spoke to National Public Radio (NRP) on condition of anonymity because company policy states that NSO “will no longer be responding to media inquiries on this matter and it will not play along with the vicious and slanderous campaign.”

The source did not specify which countries or how many, saying NSO was barred under defense regulations from identifying its clients.

Israeli officials visited NSO’s office in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, Wednesday, “in order to assess the allegations raised in regards to the company,” Israeli occupation defense ministry said in a statement.

The NSO employee said the company was cooperating fully with the probe and sought to prove to Israeli officials that the people named in the media reports were not Pegasus targets.

The Pegasus software is at the heart of a global spy scandal that prompted the Reporters Without Borders NGO to demand a moratorium on its sale and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to demand more restrictions on the trade of these systems.

An investigation by a global media consortium based on leaked targeting data provides further evidence that military-grade malware from NSO Group, the world’s most infamous hacker-for-hire outfit, is being used to spy on journalists, human rights activists and political dissidents.

From a list of more than 50,000 cellphone numbers obtained by the Paris-based journalism nonprofit Forbidden Stories and the human rights group Amnesty International and shared with 16 news organizations, journalists were able to identify more than 1,000 individuals in 50 countries who were allegedly selected by NSO clients for potential surveillance.

They include 189 journalists, more than 600 politicians and government officials, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists and several heads of state, according to The Washington Post, a consortium member.

The journalists work for organizations including The Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde and The Financial Times.

Amnesty also reported that its forensic researchers had determined that NSO Group’s flagship Pegasus spyware was successfully installed on the phone of Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, just four days after he was killed in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

The company had previously been implicated in other spying on Khashoggi.

The Guardian, another consortium member, reported that Amnesty had found traces of Pegasus infections on the cellphones of 15 journalists who let their phones be examined after discovering their number was in the leaked data.

The most numbers on the list, 15,000, were for Mexican phones, with a large share in the Middle East.

NSO Group’s spyware has been implicated in targeted surveillance chiefly in the Middle East and Mexico.

Also on the lists were phones in countries including France, Hungary, India, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Pakistan.