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AP SOURCE: NSO GROUP SPYWARE USED TO HACK US STATE DEPARTMENT EMPLOYEES
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By ALAN SUDERMAN, ERIC TUCKER and FRANK BAJAK
* Cybersecurity
* Monday, 06 Dec 2021
1:30 PM MYT
RELATED NEWS
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World 02 Dec 2021
EXPLAINER-WHO ARE ISLAMIC STATE'S AFFILIATES IN CONGO AND UGANDA?
A logo adorns a wall on a branch of the Israeli NSO Group company, near the
southern Israeli town of Sapir. The phones of 11 US State Department employees
were hacked using technology from Israel’s NSO Group, the world’s most infamous
hacker-for-hire company, a person familiar with the matter said on Dec 3. — AP
WASHINGTON: The phones of 11 US State Department employees were hacked with
spyware from Israel’s NSO Group, the world’s most infamous hacker-for-hire
company, a person familiar with the matter said on Dec 3.
The employees were all located in Uganda and included some foreign service
officers, said the person, who was not authorised to speak publicly about an
ongoing investigation. Some local Ugandan employees of the department appear to
have been among the 11 hacked, the person said.
The hacking is the first known instance of NSO Group’s trademark Pegasus spyware
being used against US government personnel.
It was not known what individual or entity used the NSO technology to hack into
the accounts, or what information was sought.
“We have been acutely concerned that commercial spyware like NSO Group software
poses a serious counterintelligence and security risk to US personnel,” White
House press secretary Jen Psaki said at briefing Friday.
Senior researcher John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab, the public-interest sleuths
at the University of Toronto who have been tracking Pegasus infections for
years, called the discovery a giant wake-up call for the US government about
diplomatic security.
“For years we have seen that diplomats around the world are among targets,” he
said, “and it looks like the message had to be brought home to the US government
in this very direct and unfortunate way. There is no exceptionalism when it
comes to American phones in diplomats’ pockets.”
News of the hacks, which were first reported by Reuters, comes a month after the
US Commerce Department blacklisted NSO Group, barring US technology from being
used by the company. And Apple sued NSO Group last week seeking to effectively
shut down its hacking of all iPhones and other Apple products, calling the
Israeli company “amoral 21st century mercenaries”.
The State Department employees were hacked on their iPhones, the person familiar
with the matter said.
NSO Group said in a statement that after being asked Thursday about the Ugandan
phones “we immediately shut down all the customers potentially relevant to this
case”, but did not say who the customers were. The company said its spying
technology is blocked from hacking phones based in the US and is only sold to
licensed customers.
If the allegations turn out to be true “they are a blunt violation” of contract
terms and NSO Group “will take legal action against these customers”, it added.
In announcing the lawsuit, Apple sent out notifications globally to people whose
iPhones were hacked with Pegasus in countries ranging from El Salvador to
Poland. The targeted State Department employees were among them.
Apple declined comment Friday on the Uganda hacks.
Marketed to governments for use solely against terrorists and criminals, Pegasus
has been abused by NSO customers to spy on human rights activists, journalists
and politicians from Saudi Arabia to Mexico, including such high-profile targets
as the fiancee of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist murdered in his
country’s consulate in Istanbul.
NSO Group has been broadly denounced for allowing such targeting, and its
placement on the Commerce Department’s “entity list” last month was the first
time a company outside of China had been added over human rights violations,
said Kevin Wolf, an attorney at Akin Gump and former top commerce official in
the Obama administration.
Analysts wonder whether NSO Group can survive financially under such
circumstances. Last week, Moody’s downgraded NSO Group’s financial outlook to
negative, saying it risked defaulting on more than US$300mil (RM1.26bil) in
loans as a result of “high uncertainty” of its ability to sell new licenses. It
said NSO Group, which is privately held, has about 750 employees with 60
customers in more than 35 countries
The impact on companies blacklisted by the Commerce Department, about half of
which are Chinese, is often far broader than barring them from using US
technology. Wolf said many companies choose to avoid doing business with them
completely “in order to eliminate the risk of an inadvertent violation” and the
legal costs of analysing whether they can.
NSO Group was asked by The Associated Press prior to Friday’s news whether it
could survive as long as it is on the entity list. While not directly
responding, it said it was “working on all appropriate channels to reverse the
Department of Commerce’s decision”.
The company again claimed that it does not operate the Pegasus
command-and-control system that remotely manages hacks “and has no access to the
data collected by its customers”. Cybersecurity researchers who have closely
tracked NSO’s spyware dispute that claim. They say NSO’s government clients are
incapable of running the online infrastructure and their sleuthing has confirmed
centralised control of post-infection operations.
Apple’s lawsuit added major heft to a Big Tech legal onslaught against NSO
Group. Facebook sued it in 2019 for allegedly hacking its globally popular
encrypted WhatsApp messaging app. Last month, a US federal appeals court ruled
that the case could go forward, rejecting NSO’s claim it should be thrown out
because it is a “sovereign entity”. – AP
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User access status: 3
Related stories:
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US puts new controls on Israeli spyware company NSO Group
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RELATED NEWS
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Updated: 06 Dec 2021|12:50 PM
FBM KLCI
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1696
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0.05014.08343,048 HSI-CI2 0.285 0.285 0.245 0.265 -0.045-14.52333,174 VSOLAR
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