(24.3.2019)
An Israeli company licenses software around the world that can crack just about any smartphone, but is its use always on the side of good?
Archiv: CyberPoint (spy corporation)
Hacking Lawyers or Journalists Is Totally Fine, Says Notorious Cyberweapons Firm
(25.3.2019)
Hulio’s company, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, first made global headlines in 2016 when its tools were used by the authoritarian government of the UAE in order to spy on Ahmed Mansoor, an award-winning human rights activist. The company has never fully addressed the spying; Mansoor currently sits, untried and unable to regularly contact his family, in an unidentified prison somewhere in the UAE on charges of criticizing the UAE government.
The spotlight did not dissuade the company. Instead, it served as an advertisement to other authoritarian governments about NSO Group’s exceptional ability …
An Israeli tech firm is selling spy software to dictators, betraying the country’s ideals
(5.12.2018)
Saudi dissident Omar Abdulaziz, who lives in Canada, has filed a lawsuit against an Israeli technology company called the NSO Group accusing it of providing the Saudi government with the surveillance software to spy on him and his friends — including Jamal Khashoggi. The program, known as Pegasus, not only allows the monitoring of all communications from a phone — all texts, all emails, all phone calls — but can also hijack a mobile phone’s microphone and camera to turn it into a surveillance device.
A New Age of Warfare: How Internet Mercenaries Do Battle for Authoritarian Governments
Before NSO helped the Saudi government track its adversaries outside the kingdom, and helped the Mexican government hunt drug kingpins, and earned hundreds of millions of dollars working for dozens of countries on six continents, the company consisted of two high school friends in northern Israel with one relatively mundane idea.
Using technology developed by graduates of Intelligence Unit 8200 — Israel’s equivalent of the N.S.A.— Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie started a company in 2008 that allowed cellphone firms to gain remote access to their customers’ devices to perform maintenance.
Word spread to Western spy services, whose operatives spotted an opportunity.