On Tuesday, WhatsApp scored a major victory against NSO Group when a jury ordered the infamous spyware maker to pay more than $167 million in damages to the Meta-owned company.
The ruling concluded a legal battle spanning more than five years, which started in October 2019 when WhatsApp accused NSO Group of hacking more than 1,400 of its users by taking advantage of a vulnerability in the chat app’s audio-calling functionality.
The verdict came after a week-long jury trial that featured several testimonies, including NSO Group’s CEO Yaron Shohat and WhatsApp employees who responded and investigated the incident.
Even before the trial began, the case had unearthed several revelations, including that NSO Group had cut off 10 of its government customers for abusing its Pegasus spyware, the locations of 1,223 of the victims of the spyware campaign, and the names of three of the spyware maker’s customers: Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Uzbekistan.
TechCrunch read the transcripts of the trial’s hearings and is highlighting the most interesting facts and revelations that came out. We will update this post as we learn more from the cache of more than 1,000 pages.
Testimony described how the WhatsApp attack worked
The zero-click attack, which means the spyware required no interaction from the target, “worked by placing a fake WhatsApp phone call to the target,” as WhatsApp’s lawyer Antonio Perez said during the trial. The lawyer explained that NSO Group had built what it called the “WhatsApp Installation Server,” a special machine designed to send malicious messages across WhatsApp’s infrastructure mimicking real messages.
“Once received, those messages would trigger the user’s phone to reach out to a third server and download the Pegasus spyware. The only thing they needed to make this happen was the phone number,” said Perez.
NSO Group’s research and development vice president Tamir Gazneli testified that “any zero-click solution whatsoever is a significant milestone for Pegasus.”
NSO Group confirms it targeted an American phone number as a test for the FBI
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For years, NSO Group has claimed that its spyware cannot be used against American phone numbers, meaning any cell number that starts with the +1 country code.
In 2022, The New York Times first reported that the company did “attack” a U.S. phone but it was part of a test for the FBI.
NSO Group’s lawyer Joe Akrotirianakis confirmed this, saying the “single exception” to Pegasus not being able to target +1 numbers “was a specially configured version of Pegasus to be used in demonstration to potential U.S. government customers.”
The FBI reportedly chose not to deploy Pegasus following its test.
How NSO Group’s government customers use Pegasus
NSO’s CEO Shohat explained that Pegasus’ user interface for its government customers does not provide an option to choose which hacking method or technique to use against the targets they are interested in, “because customers don’t care which vector they use, as long as they get the intelligence they need.”
In other words, it’s the Pegasus system in the backend that picks out which hacking technology, known as an exploit, to use each time the spyware targets an individual.
NSO Group’s headquarters shares the same building as Apple
In a funny coincidence, NSO Group’s headquarters in Herzliya, a suburb of Tel Aviv in Israel, is in the same building as Apple, whose iPhone customers are also frequently targeted by NSO’s Pegasus spyware. Shohat said NSO occupies the top five floors and Apple occupies the remainder of the 14-floor building.
The fact that NSO Group’s headquarters are openly advertised is somewhat interesting on its own. Other companies that develop spyware or zero-days like the Barcelona-based Variston, which shuttered in February, was located in a co-working space while claiming on its official website to be located somewhere else.
NSO Group admitted that it kept targeting WhatsApp users after the lawsuit was filed
Following the spyware attack, WhatsApp filed its lawsuit against NSO Group in November 2019. Despite the active legal challenge, the spyware maker kept targeting the chat app’s users, according to NSO Group’s research and development vice president Tamir Gazneli.
Gazneli said that “Erised,” the codename for one of the versions of the WhatsApp zero-click vector, was in use from late-2019 up to May 2020. The other versions were called “Eden” and “Heaven,” and the three were collectively known as “Hummingbird.”
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