The Israeli spyware maker in the Pegasus surveillance scandal said on Friday that it was investigating reports that the firm’s technology was used to target iPhones of some US diplomats in Africa.
Apple has begun alerting people whose phones were hacked by NSO’s spyware, which essentially turns handsets into pocket spying devices and sparked controversy this year after reportedly being used on advocates, journalists and politicians.
“On top of the independent investigation, NSO will cooperate with any relevant government authority and present the full information we will have,” the firm said in a statement.
NSO said it has not confirmed its tools were used, but opted to “terminate relevant customers’ access to the system” due to the seriousness of the allegations reported by Reuters and the Washington Post.
The Post reported that Apple alerted 11 US diplomats that their iPhones were hacked in the past few months, citing people familiar with the notifications who said the attacks focused on officials working in Uganda or east Africa.
NSO Group’s spyware has been engulfed in scandal since reports that Pegasus was used by foreign government clients to target the phones of human rights advocates, embassy employees and others.
Apple sued the firm last month seeking to block NSO from using the Silicon Valley giant’s services to target the more than 1 billion iPhones in circulation. Reuters, citing four people familiar with the matter, said nine US diplomats were targeted and added that the intrusions represented the widest known hacks of US officials using NSO technology.
Just weeks before the Apple lawsuit, US authorities blacklisted NSO to restrict exports from US groups over allegations that the Israeli firm “enabled foreign governments to conduct transnational repression.”
Smartphones infected with Pegasus are essentially turned into surveillance devices, allowing the user to read the target’s messages, look through their photographs, track their location and even turn on their camera without them knowing.
Concern over Pegasus spyware further grew after Apple revealed in September that it had patched a weakness that allowed NSO’s spyware to infect devices without users even clicking on a malicious message or link.
The so-called “zero-click” attack is able to silently corrupt the targeted device, and was identified by researchers at Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog organization in Canada.
Apple said at the time it filed the lawsuit in a California federal court that it would notify the “small number” of users that it discovered might have been targeted by those types of attacks.
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