You must have heard about an Israeli firm that has been in the news lately regarding a hack with WhatsApp users. The news became more popular because the group allegedly hacked the Saudi Crown Prince’s WhatsApp account and revealed details about their chat with the Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. It is also known that the hack was used as a spying tool to hack Amazon CEO’s WhatsApp chats by the crown prince. Now, we are talking about none other than Israel’s NSO group which provides spying tools to government agencies all over the world.
Now, it has been mentioned time and again that NSO Group is hacking WhatsApp messages from various users. But there was no confirmation of the same from Facebook or WhatsApp but that has changed now. Because the company has now “alleged in new court filings that an Israeli spyware company used US-based servers and was “deeply involved” in carrying out mobile phone hacks of 1,400 WhatsApp users, including senior government officials, journalists, and human rights activists”.
WhatsApp says that NSO Group is found to have done “serious human rights violations” since it is also found to be involved in hacking more than a dozen Indian journalists and Rwandan dissidents. On the other hand, NSO Group says that they are selling their spying tool to the government agencies with the aim to help them in catching terrorists as well as other criminals. However, they don’t know how those officials are using their tool and they are not ruling out the allegations at all.
This tool from the NSO Group known as Pegasus is a very powerful spying tool. WhatsApp claims that it found out in its investigation that Pegasus was used from servers controlled by NSO Group – not its government clients – and they were an integral part of how the hacks were executed.
