![]() Spyware has increasingly become a concern beyond NSO Group. Microsoft filed an amicus brief in support of the case last year. WhatsApp accused NSO Group in 2019 of allowing its spyware to be used by governments to target high-ranking officials. citizens and organizations along with foreign governments. Reuters reported last year that the FBI was investigating the use of NSO Group spyware in potential hacking operations against U.S. This is far from the first time that products from NSO Group, and the company itself, have come under fire for allegations of human rights and privacy abuses. ![]() “While that means they are not a threat to the overwhelming majority of our users, we continue to work tirelessly to defend all our customers, and we are constantly adding new protections for their devices and data,” Krstić added.Ī spokesperson for NSO Group told The Hill in a statement Monday that “NSO Group will continue to provide intelligence and law enforcement agencies around the world with life saving technologies to fight terror and crime” but did not comment directly on the Citizen Lab report. “Attacks like the ones described are highly sophisticated, cost millions of dollars to develop, often have a short shelf life, and are used to target specific individuals.” ![]() “We’d like to commend Citizen Lab for successfully completing the very difficult work of obtaining a sample of this exploit so we could develop this fix quickly,” Krstić said. Ivan Krstić, head of Security Engineering and Architecture at Apple, told The Hill in a statement Monday that Apple had “rapidly developed” the security updates after identifying the vulnerability. “This spyware can do everything an iPhone user can do on their device and more,” John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, told The New York Times on Monday. The vulnerability discovered by the researchers targeted the Apple image rendering library, enabling NSO Group to remotely infect and exploit the targeted devices. The New York Times first reported the discovery of the vulnerability on Monday.Ĭitizen Lab researchers discovered the vulnerability while examining the phone of a Saudi Arabian activist that had been known to be infected with an NSO Group spyware program. The vulnerability, discovered by researchers at Citizen Lab, applied to Apple iOS, MacOS and WatchOS products, and was described by the researchers as a “zero-day zero-click exploit” targeted against iMessage.Īpple released security updates for each of the products on Monday after Citizen Lab disclosed the vulnerability to the company last week, with Apple noting in the update that it was “aware of a report that this issue may have been actively exploited.” All rights reserved.Apple on Monday released a series of emergency security updates following the discovery of a vulnerability that allowed Israeli company NSO Group to infect Apple products with spyware. The company has previously acknowledged similarly serious flaws and, in what Strafach estimated to be perhaps a dozen occasions, has noted that it was aware of reports that such security holes had been exploited.Ĭopyright 2022 The Associated Press. Security researcher Will Strafach said he had seen no technical analysis of the vulnerabilities that Apple has just patched. Its spyware is known to have been used in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America against journalists, dissidents and human rights activists. NSO Group has been blacklisted by the U.S. ![]() In all cases, it cited an anonymous researcher.Ĭommercial spyware companies such as Israel’s NSO Group are known for identifying and taking advantage of such flaws, exploiting them in malware that surreptitiously infects targets’ smartphones, siphons their contents and surveils the targets in real time. Apple did not say in the reports how, where or by whom the vulnerabilities were discovered.
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