Israeli firm linked to WhatsApp hack faces lawsuit backed by Amnesty International over spyware

The human rights group’s concerns are detailed in a lawsuit filed in Israel by about 50 members and supporters of Amnesty International Israel and others from the human rights community. It has called on the country’s ministry of defence to ban the export of NSO’s Pegasus software, which can covertly take control of a mobile phone, copy its data and turn on the microphone for surveillance.

An affidavit from Amnesty is at the heart of the case, and concludes that “staff of Amnesty International have an ongoing and well-founded fear they may continue to be targeted and ultimately surveilled” after a hacking attempt last year.

NSO Group, founded in 2010, supplies industry-leading surveillance software to governments that it says is for tackling terrorism and serious crime, and has been licensed to dozens of countries including Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Bahrain and the UAE.

But there have been a string of complaints in the past few months, documented largely by the Toronto-based Citizen Lab, that the technology has been used to target human rights groups, activists and journalists by several countries – and that there has been no attempt to rein it in.

That culminated, earlier this week, in the announcement by Facebook-owned WhatsApp that it had raced to patch up a security hole in its messaging service, which it believed had been exploited by NSO Group, that would have allowed spyware to be placed on a person’s mobile phone simply via a missed WhatsApp call.

That represents a technical step beyond the breaches reported by Amnesty in its lawsuit, although it is not the first time that NSO has been accused of exploiting WhatsApp to hack phones.

Last June, an Amnesty staffer received “a suspicious message over WhatsApp”, according to the affidavit. The recipient was asked to cover the protest “for your brothers detained in Saudi Arabia in front of the Saudi embassy in Washington” and invited to click a link.