THEY EXPOSED AN ISRAELI SPYWARE FIRM. NOW THE COMPANY IS BADGERING THEM IN COURT – By Shawn Musgrave (The Intercept) / May 6, 2024
NSO Group, which makes Pegasus spyware, keeps trying to extract information from Citizen Lab researchers — and a judge keeps swatting it down.
FOR YEARS, CYBERSECURITY researchers at Citizen Lab have monitored Israeli spyware firm NSO Group and its banner product, Pegasus. In 2019, Citizen Lab reported finding dozens of cases in which Pegasus was used to target the phones of journalists and human rights defenders via a WhatsApp security vulnerability.
Now NSO, which is blacklisted by the U.S. government for selling spyware to repressive regimes, is trying to use a lawsuit over the WhatsApp exploit to learn “how Citizen Lab conducted its analysis.”
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. federal court in 2019 by WhatsApp and Meta (then Facebook), alleges that NSO sent Pegasus and other malware to approximately 1,400 devices across the globe. For more than four years, NSO has failed repeatedly to get the case thrown out.
With the lawsuit now moving forward, NSO is trying a different tactic: demanding repeatedly that Citizen Lab, which is based in Canada, hand over every single document about its Pegasus investigation. A judge denied NSO’s latest attempt to get access to Citizen Lab’s materials last week.
CONTINUE > https://theintercept.com/2024/05/06/pegasus-nso-group-israeli-spyware-citizen-lab/
