A man walks by the building entrance of NSO Group at one of its branches in the Arava Desert.
NSO Group Technologies, the Israeli company that created the military-grade spy software used to target the mobile phones of journalists, political dissidents, and human rights activists, is being sued by Apple.
NSO, the largest known Israeli cyber warfare company, was accused in the lawsuit of having spied on and targeted Apple users. It is trying to get an order stopping NSO from using any Apple software.
NSO develops and sells a program called Pegasus, which exploits vulnerabilities in phones and allows those who deploy it to sneak into a target's device undetected.
NSO's clients used a recently patched vulnerability called FORCEDENTRY to deliver code to a number of targets, according to Apple's suit.
NSO said its software helped governments catch paedophiles and terrorists.
The company has never provided any evidence to back up those claims, because they are based on confidentiality agreements with the government agencies that NSO sells to.
Two people familiar with the request say that the Israeli government has recently appealed to them to help lobby the White House to remove NSO from a US Department of Commerce blacklist.
Advertisement
It is not known if the request has been acted on by the Israeli government.
The US government added NSO Group and Candiru to the trade blacklist, which would restrict exports of US hardware and software to the companies, as it cracks down on the global hacking-for-hire industry.
Moody's cut NSO's debt two levels to eight levels below investment grade, indicating a high risk of default on $500 million in loans.
The company had a bank credit line that was fully drawn down and was in a tight spot, according to Moody's.
An investigation by a group of newspapers found that the phone was used to target journalists, human rights activists, and politicians.
State-sponsored actors like the NSO Group spend millions of dollars on sophisticated technology without accountability. Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice-president of software engineering, said in a statement that that needs to change. Private companies developing state-sponsored spyware have become even more dangerous because Apple devices are the most secure consumer hardware on the market.
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that NSO and its parent company Q Cyber were not protected from a lawsuit brought by Facebook because they were not a single entity.
In the complaint, Apple called NSO a group of notorious and amoral hackers that act asmercenaries, creating cyber-surveillance machinery that invites routine and blatant abuse.
The US company accused NSO of violating multiple federal and state laws, which they said was due to their efforts to target and attack Apple customers.
Apple issued an emergency software update in September after a vulnerability from Pegasus was exposed by researchers at the University of Toronto.
The Financial Times is a division of The Financial Times. All rights are not to be redistributed, copied or modified.
