The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

WhatsApp monitoring: Facebook sues Israeli developers of spyware

2019-10-30T12:28:44.147Z


The Israeli company NSO is developing surveillance software to spy on journalists and dissidents, among others. Because the infection was temporarily over WhatsApp, Facebook complains now.



For the first time Facebook defends itself in court against the abuse of its services for monitoring purposes. The company is suing an Israeli provider of surveillance software who wanted to gain access to hundreds of smartphones via a WhatsApp vulnerability. Just within two weeks in April and May of this year, the company NSO attacked in this way around 1400 devices, Facebook said in the lawsuit filed Tuesday in California.

Among the target persons were journalists, lawyers, dissidents, human rights activists, diplomats and government officials. They came from countries like Bahrain, Mexico and the United Arab Emirates.

Facebook had already closed the security hole in mid-May and made it public. According to Facebook, NSO was able to spread malware via WhatsApp calls, which enabled extensive data retrieval. Anyone who got them unnoticed on his smartphone could be monitored almost completely. The vulnerability existed in the WhatsApp apps for Android, iOS, Windows Phone and Tizen.

Amazon could support Facebook

The NSO program, known as "Pegasus," installed itself on the devices even when the target people did not answer the call. After that, it connected to Israeli company servers, giving them access to contact information and message content on devices, among other things. The captured data passed NSO on to its customers.

The company rejected Facebook's allegations. One would "vehemently resist".

In fact, the legal dispute could become very complex. Facebook is building its lawsuit on the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in connection with a violation of its Terms of Use, but the exact process strategy is still unclear. US legal experts point out that there may be no precedent for Facebook's argumentation and it may be difficult to convince the judges.

In theory, Facebook could get help from Amazon, among others. His cloud service AWS NSO used to connect the monitored smartphones with those servers, then the actual spyware was distributed, it is said in the lawsuit.

Not only should Amazon have appropriate accounting records that could become important in the process. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is also the owner of the Washington Post, whose columnist Jamal Khashoggi was assassinated in the Consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul in 2018. Khashoggi had previously been in contact with another dissident whose smartphone was infected with the NSO software, as Canadian security researchers have demonstrated.

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2019-10-30

You may like

Trends 24h

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.