After WhatsApp and Meta sued the Israeli-based NSO Group over its Pegasus spyware, Apple is now following suit. Today, the company announced a lawsuit against
After WhatsApp and Meta sued the Israeli-based NSO Group over its Pegasus spyware, Apple is now following suit. Today, the company announced a lawsuit against the NSO Group in an effort to “curb the abuse of state-sponsored spyware.” Apple is seeking damages in the case (which weren’t revealed in today’s announcement) and is looking to bar the NSO Group from using any “Apple software, services, or devices” in the future. As Apple explains in the announcement of this lawsuit today, the NSO Group is responsible for a zero-click exploit called FORCEDENTRY, which installs the Pegasus spyware on personal devices by taking advantage of an integer overflow vulnerability. Apple points to a Citizen Lab report from back in September as evidence that the NSO Group is using Pegasus to spy on “journalists, activists, dissidents, academics, and government officials,” violating human rights in the process. While Apple has patched the vulnerability and says that Pegasus was ultimately used to attack only a “small number” of users, the notion that the NSO Group has been abusing the software to spy on political opponents, journalists, and academics on behalf of Israel is indeed very worrying.
