Israeli company NSO Group, creator of Pegasus software, has been fined by a Californian court for allowing the infiltration of 1,400 phones, the BBC reported on Wednesday. The owner will pay $167 million in fines and damages to Meta.
WhatsApp owner Meta, which filed the lawsuit, said it was “the first victory against the development and use of illegal spyware.” The court awarded the company $444,000 in damages and fined NSO Group $167 million.
Pegasus is malware that can be installed remotely on mobile phones and gain access to users’ microphones and cameras, among other things. NSO Group, critics say, has enabled authoritarian regimes to monitor journalists, activists, and politicians.
NSO said it would “carefully review the details of the verdict and take appropriate legal action, including initiating further proceedings and filing an appeal.” The company said its solution was intended solely for combating serious criminals and terrorists. However, there have been allegations in multiple countries that Pegasus was being used to target anyone authorities deemed a threat to national security.
In 2021, a list of 50,000 phone numbers whose owners could have been wiretapped using Pegasus was released to the media. It included the phones of politicians and heads of state, company directors, activists and several members of the Arab royal family, as well as over 180 journalists. The victims of wiretapping could also have been relatives of Jamal Khashoggi, a critic of the Saudi Arabian government, murdered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 – the BBC recalled. In Poland, Pegasus was supposed to have infected, among others, the phones of Roman Giertych, prosecutor Ewa Wrzosek, Krzysztof Brejza and Jacek Karnowski. The legality of actions taken in Poland using this software by the government, secret services and police from November 2015 to November 2023 is being examined by a parliamentary inquiry committee. The commission is also to determine who was responsible for purchasing Pegasus and similar tools for the Polish authorities.
The California court has been considering the Pegasus case for six years. “The jury's decision to force NSO to pay damages is a key deterrent to this malicious industry's illegal activities against American companies,” a Meta representative said of the court's decision.
“We strongly believe that our technology plays a critical role in preventing serious crime and terrorism and that it is deployed responsibly by authorized government agencies,” NSO said in a statement.
WhatsApp's victory could make it easier for other tech giants whose platforms have fallen victim to spyware to take action against NSO, the portal said. (PAP)
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