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Facebook tried to buy Pegasus to monitor Apple users: NSO CEO
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Top Stories |
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IANS | 04 Apr, 2020
The CEO of Israel-based
surveillance company NSO Group has claimed that Facebook proposed to buy
its malicious software Pegasus in 2017 to snoop on Apple iOS users.
In
court documents filed during an ongoing lawsuit in which Facebook has
sued the NSO Group for snooping on WhatsApp users last year including in
India, NSO CEO Shalev Hulio claimed that "two Facebook representatives
approached NSO in October 2017 and asked to purchase the right to use
certain capabilities of Pegasus".
According to a report in Vice
on Saturday citing court documents, "it seems the Facebook
representatives were not interested in buying parts of Pegasus as a
hacking tool to remotely break into phones, but more as a way to more
effectively monitor phones of users who had already installed Onavo".
Onavo
Protect – a Facebook's software that was going to get the functionality
-- was billed as a piece of VPN software. Onavo was used primarily to
gather information about what other apps Facebook users were using on
their mobile devices.
"The Facebook representatives stated that
Facebook was concerned that its method for gathering user data through
Onavo Protect was less effective on Apple devices than on Android
devices," according to the court filing.
A Facebook spokesperson
said in a statement that the NSO CEO is misrepresenting conversations
between the company and Facebook employees.
"NSO is trying to
distract from the facts Facebook and WhatsApp filed in court over six
months ago. Their attempt to avoid responsibility includes inaccurate
representations about both their spyware and a discussion with people
who work at Facebook," the spokesperson said.
"Our lawsuit
describes how NSO is responsible for attacking over 100 human rights
activists and journalists around the world," the Facebook spokesperson
added.
NSO has maintained that it sells Pegasus only to intelligence and law enforcement agency clients.
Apple last year forced Facebook to remove Onavo Protect from the App Store.
Facebook has even blamed Apple's operating system for the hacking of Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos' phone.
Investigators
believe that Bezos's iPhone was compromised after he received a 4.4MB
video file containing malware via WhatsApp -- in the same way when
phones of 1,400 select people including journalists and human rights
activists were broken into by Pegasus software from NSO Group last year.
In
an interview to the BBC, Facebook's Vice President of Global Affairs
and Communications, Nick Clegg, has said it wasn't WhatsApp's fault
because end-to-end encryption is unhackable and blamed Apple's operating
system for Bezos' episode.
The NSO Group has denied it was part of Bezos' hacking.
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