The image is by Alex Castro.
Apple is following in the footsteps of other companies, such as the parent company of Facebook, Meta. Apple is seeking a permanent injunction to ban NSO Group from using any Apple software, services, or devices, after promising new information about how NSO Group targeted iPhones with a zero-click exploit.
The NSO agreed to the terms of service.
Senior VP of software engineering Craig Federighi said in a statement that state-sponsored actors like the NSO Group spend millions of dollars on sophisticated surveillance technologies without effective accountability. Apple devices are the most secure consumer hardware on the market, but private companies developing state-sponsored spyware have become even more dangerous. Last year, tech companies including Microsoft and Google filed a brief in support of Facebook in its lawsuit against the NSO Group.
According to an Apple press release, the software is designed to allow governments to remotely access a phone's microphones, cameras, and other data. It is designed to be able to take over a phone without the user having to take any action, according to reports that came out earlier this year from a journalistic coalition called the Pegasus Project.
The lawsuit is against Apple.
Heather Grenier, Apple's senior director of commercial litigation, said in a statement to The New York Times that the lawsuit was meant to send a clear signal that the company wouldn't allow users to suffer abuse. The group created more than one hundred Apple IDs to help it send data to targets, which is why Apple says NSO violated its terms of service.
The Court has personal jurisdiction over Defendants because they created more than one hundred Apple IDs and agreed to Apple's iCloud Terms and Conditions, which constitutes express consent.
In Apple's complaint, it explains how the attack worked, with NSO sending data to a target via iMessage after determining that they were using an Apple device. That would allow NSO to secretly install the Pegasus spyware and control what was being collected on the phone. You can read more about the vulnerability that NSO was using here. NSO was sending files that exploited a bug in how iMessage rendered images.
In its press release, Apple says that it has not observed any evidence of successful remote attacks against devices running iOS 15 and later versions. The latest versions of the software were said to be vulnerable to attack when the Pegasus Project published its reports in July.
For more information about the reporting done on Pegasus, see our explainer.
Related.
Here is what we know about NSO's Pegasus.
Apple will be supporting organizations pursuing cybersurveillance research and advocacy, both financially and with technical resources. The company will give $10 million to groups working on counter-surveillance and pledges to give free technical, threat intelligence, and engineering assistance to Citizen Lab, a group of researchers that were involved in the lawsuit. Apple says it will do the same for other organizations.
The US Entity List limits the ways American companies can sell or provide technology to the company.
