Glitch on Saudi Activist’s iPhone Exposed Spyware Company’s International Hacking Weapon
The discovery was the first to provide a blueprint of a powerful new form of cyberespionage, a hacking tool that penetrates devices without any interaction from the user.
Landwebs
An unusual error in spyware employed by NSO Group, one of the world’s most sophisticated spyware companies now facing a cascade of legal action and scrutiny in Washington, allowed Saudi women’s rights activist Loujain al-Hathloul and privacy researchers like Citizen Lab, a Canadian privacy rights group, to discover a trove of evidence suggesting the Israeli spyware maker had helped hack not only her iPhone, but also those of government officials and dissidents around the world, reports Reuters. Citizen Lab and al-Hathloul’s find provided the basis for Apple’s November 2021 lawsuit against NSO and it also reverberated in Washington, where U.S. officials learned that NSO’s cyberweapon was used to spy on American diplomats. Security researchers say the al-Hathloul discovery was the first to provide a blueprint of a powerful new form of cyberespionage, a hacking tool that penetrates devices without any interaction from the user, providing the most concrete evidence to date of the scope of the weapon.
