Victim's iPhone hacked by Pegasus spyware weeks after Apple sued NSO

Source: The Guadian

Victim’s iPhone hacked by Pegasus spyware weeks after Apple sued NSO

Quartet targeted by clients – thought to be Jordanian government agencies – of Israeli company even after Apple sued in November

Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington
@skirchy
Tue 5 Apr 2022 20.25 BST
Last modified on Tue 5 Apr 2022 20.43 BST

New evidence has revealed that an Apple iPhone was successfully hacked by a government user of NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware in December, weeks after the technology giant sued the Israeli company in a US court and called for it to be banned from “harming individuals” using Apple products.

A report published on Tuesday by security researchers at Front Line Defenders (FLD) and Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto found that phones belonging to four Jordanian human rights defenders, lawyers and journalists were hacked by government clients of NSO – which appear to be Jordanian government agencies – from August 2019 to December 2021.

The news appears to show that Apple users could still be vulnerable to surveillance by NSO’s government clients, even after the company sued NSO last November. At the time, Apple said it was filing suit against NSO and its parent company to “hold them accountable” for the “surveillance and targeting of Apple users”. It followed the identification of an exploit by Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto that allowed users of NSO to infect iPhones with the company’s Pegasus spyware through a vulnerability in its iMessage function. Apple said at the time that the vulnerability had been patched.

“The fact that the targeting we uncovered happened after the widespread publicity around Apple’s lawsuit and notifications to victims is especially remarkable; a firm that truly respected such concerns would have at least paused operations for government clients, like Jordan, that have a widely publicised track record of human rights concerns,” the report by FLD and Citizen Lab said.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/05/apple-iphone-pegasus-spyware-nso-group-israel-jordan