By Raphael Satter
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Israel’s NSO Group was handed a $168 million penalty by a federal jury in California on Tuesday for hijacking the servers of WhatsApp in order to hack users of the Meta-owned chat platform on behalf of foreign spy agencies. The case caps a six-year battle between the American social media giant and the surveillance firm. It has also cast a unusual amount of light on the inner workings of the spyware industry.
Here is what we have learned:
TOP-SHELF SPYWARE IS NOT CHEAP
Between 2018 and 2020 NSO charged its European government customers a “standard price” of $7 million for use of its platform to hack 15 different devices at a time, according to Sarit Bizinsky Gil, NSO’s vice president of global business operations. The executive said the ability to hack a phone outside the customer’s country was a separate add-on worth approximately $1 million or $2 million.
“It is a highly sophisticated product,” Meta lawyer Antonio Perez told the court in his opening statement, “And it carries a hefty price tag.”
NSO HACKED THOUSANDS OF DEVICES
Between 2018 and 2020 the Israeli spyware firm was responsible for breaking into thousands of devices, according to Tamir Gazneli, NSO’s vice president of research and development. During the trial, Gazneli said he disagreed with the idea that his company sold “spyware,” leading to an exchange with Perez in which Gazneli insisted his firm’s tools were used to gather intelligence on targets but “not people.”
“You don’t consider the targets people, Mr. Gazneli?” Perez asked him.
“That’s not what I said,” he responded. “What I said is that the targets are intelligence targets of intelligence agencies.”
AMERICAN TAXPAYERS SENT MILLIONS TO NSO’S COFFERS
The Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation collectively paid NSO $7.6 million, according to court records. The agencies’ past dealings with the Israeli spyware company had previously been disclosed by The New York Times, which said the CIA bankrolled Djibouti’s purchase of NSO spyware and the bureau bought it for testing, but the trial put a price tag on the relationship.
NSO TARGETED WHATSAPP’S INFRASTRUCTURE DURING THE LAWSUIT
The lawsuit against NSO did not deter the spyware firm from continuing to abuse WhatsApp’s infrastructure, Meta’s lawyers said in a court document filed late last month.
“NSO repeatedly targeted Plaintiffs, Plaintiffs’ servers, and Plaintiffs’ mobile client even after this litigation was filed,” the filing said.
The filing seeks a permanent injunction against NSO, which it said “poses a significant threat of ongoing and prospective harm” to Meta, its platform, and its users.
(Reporting by Raphael Satter; Editing by David Gregorio)
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