NSO Group Concepts

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy

by Laurent Richard and Sandrine Rigaud · 17 Jan 2023 · 350pp · 115,802 words

call appeared urgent, in that it was coming at close to midnight Tel Aviv time, August 5, 2020, from somebody in senior management at the NSO Group. Cherie Blair, former First Lady of the United Kingdom, longtime barrister, noted advocate for women entrepreneurs in Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East, a

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. So long as the price was right. The leading spyware technology companies had, by 2020, adjusted their focus from personal computers to cell phones, with NSO Group right out front. The consequences had been predictable. Security researchers first found evidence of a cell phone infected with NSO’s Pegasus in 2016—in

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upset, because we know the truth.’” They wanted him to tell their truth. So Shalev insisted to Bergman (on behalf of his beleaguered staff) that NSO Group was a force for good in a really scary world. “In the past six months alone,” he said, “the company’s products aided in foiling

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’s NSA, with its top-shelf cryptographers, right?) for Niv, Shalev, and Omri, and registered it with the State of Israel in January 2010 as NSO Group Technologies LTD. Niv had the coding chops, and he also had some insight into Israeli counterintelligence operations and bureaucratic processes. The Israeli Ministry of Defense

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make-believe. Hacking Team had set out to produce a point-by-point memo describing the advantages of RCS over Pegasus. Vincenzetti’s agents plied NSO Group employees with dinner and drinks to try to get them to spill the secrets of Pegasus, according to the company’s leaked internal emails. They

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risk the entire enterprise, not to mention the safety of the source. I opened the meeting by defining the journalistic imperatives of this investigation into NSO Group and its Pegasus spyware. The data was not our story, I reminded everybody. The leak was not our headline. We had been handed a remarkable

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most intriguing presentations of the symposium. Kai is one of the few journalists to have conducted an on-the-record interview with the CEO of NSO group. “I think Shalev Hulio agreed to meet us because they were getting a lot of fire at that moment, and he hoped to get a

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and Donncha caught them out. They found those domain names in the new infrastructure, and that told them who was running the system. This was NSO Group. This was Pegasus. “Each Pegasus Installation server or Command-and-Control (C&C) server hosted a web server on port 443 with a unique domain

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and TLS certificate,” they would write. “These edge servers would then proxy connections through a chain of servers, referred to by NSO Group as the ‘Pegasus Anonymizing Transmission Network.’” The search for new Pegasus domains matching the fingerprint also led Claudio and Donncha to a second victim. Yahya

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of all the domain names linked to NSO attacks. Danna Ingleton scorched the company: “Amnesty International will not stand idly by as companies such as NSO Group profit from selling their invasive Pegasus software to repressive states around the world.” Citizen Lab backed Claudio and Donncha with its own findings. And it

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in their first joint research project. The Pegasus system was not invisible, and NSO’s technologists were not invincible. They made mistakes. One consequential misstep NSO Group had made was in riling Claudio Guarnieri and his new partner, Donncha Ó Cearbhaill. “I guess I got quite pissed off about the attack on

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’t overregulate.” * * * THAT ONE AND only don’t was a crucial driver of the consistently upward growth curve enjoyed by Israel’s cyber industry. But NSO Group belonged to a small and sensitive subset of that industry—representing only about 5 percent of that sector, according to an estimate by the chief

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on four separate occasions in the first few weeks of September alone. On September 10, 2019, three days after an attack on Khadija’s iPhone, NSO Group trumpeted its new corporate governance regime. This updated policy was designed to bring the company into “alignment with the UN Guiding Principles of Human Rights

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on the scale of human rights, rule of law, freedom of the press and expression, and corruption was an awfully large and ungainly lump for NSO Group and others to sweep under the international carpets, and had been for years. President Aliyev, one US diplomat admitted, “complicates our approach to Baku and

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misuse. The updated compliance regime, which seemed more like an updated set of talking points, had been pushed hard by the new majority owner of NSO Group, the recently hatched London-based hedge fund Novalpina. More established firms had taken a hard look at buying NSO and bailed. The partners at Novalpina

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was out as prime minister, and Naftali Bennett was in. But it seemed very unlikely that the new administration would be any less protective of NSO Group. The Post thought that Israeli authorities knew something was heating up around the company and its technology, and Bennett’s administration was worried about a

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three new analyses and went straight to the money paragraph: “We conclude with high confidence,” it read, that all three iPhones “were successfully infected with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware during the dates mentioned. Our high confidence conclusion stems from the fact that we have never seen the above process names used

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in a benign context, and we have only ever seen the above process names used in high-confidence cases of infection with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware.” I posted my synopsis of the first stage of the peer review on the secure site that each of the partners could

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and selling to law enforcement and intelligence agencies the tools to catch the bad guys. “The centerpiece of this is a leak of data from NSO Group,” Paul told Snowden in their Zoom call on July 5, 2021. “We have fifty thousand phone numbers.” Edward Snowden is not easily shocked by stories

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cannot communicate, we cannot trade, we cannot go about our lives in a normal expected way today without using these.… The only thing that the NSO group does, their only product is trying to discover weaknesses in these devices that we all rely on and then sell them commercially.… There’s no

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their public claims to the contrary. When you create the means of infection, and you start passing them off to the highest bidder, as the NSO Group has done and is doing and will do tomorrow—if nothing changes, you’re creating, you are guaranteeing that the world will be less safe

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all she said, and she was off the phone. I read the response aloud to Sandrine, trying to make sense of it as I went. “NSO Group firmly denies false claims made in your report which many of them are uncorroborated theories that raise serious doubts about the reliability of your sources

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naturally expect you to provide some modicum of proof,” I continued reading to Sandrine. “Instead, it appears you are simply furthering the salacious narrative about NSO Group that has been strategically concocted by several closely aligned special interest groups.” The unsigned email from NSO.com simply repeated the Khashoggi denial, the assertions

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to access phones with US numbers,” that NSO can and does terminate the system if the company discovers misuse. “Simply put,” the letter concluded, “the NSO Group is on a life-saving mission, and the company will faithfully execute this mission undeterred, despite any and all continued attempts to discredit it on

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had gotten a very different message from NSO, or rather from the company’s hired lawyer in Washington, DC. “Our firm is defamation counsel to NSO Group,” was the opener. “It is evident that Forbidden Stories has already formulated (and intends to publish on its own platform) a false, preconceived, and highly

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damaging narrative regarding NSO Group—and that it intends to do so regardless of the actual facts.… We are putting OCCRP on formal notice that Forbidden Stories will publish defamatory

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falsehoods about NSO Group in its series of articles and that, should OCCRP elect to publish or republish any portion of those articles, OCCRP runs a substantial risk of

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list of numbers targeted by governments using Pegasus, but instead, may be part of a larger list of numbers that might have been used by NSO Group customers for other purposes.” (He did not explain what these other purposes might have been.) He denied Saudi Arabia had targeted the lawyer of Jamal

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NSO had “lost control” of Pegasus in Mexico, or that any nongovernmental users had the opportunity to abuse the spyware in that country, or that NSO Group is “a tool of Israeli diplomacy” or a back door for Israeli intelligence. His letter was a little hard to decipher—the denials appeared to

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, I’m sure.” The investigation was into more than NSO, Paul’s colleague pointed out, while reading the lede of the explainer. “Could we say ‘NSO Group and its clients’?” Paul suggested. “Yes,” she agreed. “‘And its clients.’ Stick in ‘and its clients.’” Three minutes later, the Guardian’s series into NSO

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, vs. privacy NEC Neryia, Avishai Netanyahu, Benjamin “network injection attack” Nevada News of the World New York Times Nexa Technologies Nicolino, Fabrice North Korea Novalpina NSO Group Technologies LTD (see also Pegasus) Aliyev government and Azano and bar on infecting mobile phones with US numbers clients of. see also Pegasus end users

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race

by Nicole Perlroth · 9 Feb 2021 · 651pp · 186,130 words

dug through detailed customer records, product descriptions, price lists, even photos secretly captured off phones. They belonged to a highly secretive Israeli spyware company called NSO Group that I had only heard of in passing whispers. NSO did not have a corporate website. I could find only a passing mention of it

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; antivirus software; the Java code that touched cell phones and laptops, data centers and supercomputers, the internet? The iPhone and Android jailbreaks that Zerodium and NSO Group and others now paid top dollar for required chains of zero-day exploits to work. If they could neuter just one flaw in the chain

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they are published—Day Zero—as companies race to roll out a patch, and customers to install it. In a dig, an exploit developer called NSO Group “the ‘commercial arm’ of Project Zero.” But the alternative—keeping research silent—didn’t do anything to improve security long-term. There was another benefit

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depths to which Mexico abused NSO’s surveillance technology. Mark Mazzetti, Adam Goldman, Ronen Bergman and I wrote a comprehensive account of Dark Matter and NSO Group for the Times. And later Mark, Ronen and I reported that a widely downloaded mobile app, called ToTok—a play on the popular Chinese app

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Conference, More Evidence of Abuse,” New York Times, October 10, 2012, and “Intimidating Dissidents with Spyware,” New York Times, May 30, 2016, and later chronicled NSO Group in a number of articles for the Times. After recordings of George Hotz’s conversation with and exploit broker leaked online, Hotz denied the deal

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0-Day to Hacking Team,” July 20, 2015. CHAPTER 13: GUNS FOR HIRE For a contemporary account of Francisco Partner’s private equity investment in NSO Group, see Orr Hirschauge, “Overseas Buyers Snap Up Two More Israeli Cyber Security Firms,” Haaretz, March 19, 2014. For the FBI’s first public statement on

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, General Counsel, FBI, Testimony Before the House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, February 17, 2011. This later became NSO Group’s marketing pitch. For details on NSO Group’s pricing, see my 2016 account in the New York Times, “Phone Spying Is Made Easy. Choose a Plan,” September 3, 2016

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five Symbian users on top of that set-up fee. The company also charged an annual 17-percent maintenance fee. Hacking Team’s anxieties over NSO Group’s “over the air stealth installation” feature can be read in Hacking Team’s leaked emails available on WikiLeaks: wikileaks.org/hackingteam/emails/emailid/6619

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. I first learned of NSO Group’s relationship with Mexican government agencies from the leaks my source provided in 2016. Partnering with Azam Ahmed in Mexico, we were able to detail

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inquiry, Kirk Semple, “Government Spying Allegations in Mexico Spur Calls for Inquiry,” New York Times, June 21, 2017. To date, these inquiries have gone nowhere. NSO Group’s relationship with Finland has never been documented. To better understand why Finland would be interested in its spy tools, see Simon Tidsall, “Finland Warns

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. Bill Marczak and John Scott-Railton, together with researchers at Lookout, were the first to publish research on NSO Group’s spyware in the UAE, and on Ahmed Mansoor specifically. See “The Million Dollar Dissident: NSO Group’s iPhone Zero-Days Used against a UAE Human Rights Defender,” Citizen Lab, August 24, 2016, which

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iOS to Patch a Security Hole Used to Spy on Dissidents,” New York Times, August 26, 2016, and Richard Silverstein, “Israel’s Cyber Security Firm ‘NSO Group’ Permits Foreign Intelligence Agencies to Spy on Human Rights Activists,” Global Research, June 20, 2017. Later Marczak, Railton, and Citizen Lab researchers Sarah McKune, Bahr

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Abdul Razzak, and Ron Diebert were able to tie NSO Group’s Pegasus software to operations in forty-five countries. See “Hide and Seek: Tracking NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware to Operations in 45 Countries,” Citizen Lab, September 18, 2018. Because NSO customers can route

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exploits leaks, here, here, here, here used by foreign governments, here, here, here, here, here, here, here NSA National Computer Security Center (the Fort), here NSO Group (Israel) asking prices, here customers, here ethics, here mentioned, here Pegasus software, here, here, here Shadow Brokers compared, here surveillance technology, here, here zero-click

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password-spraying attacks, here password-stealing tools, here PATCH Act—Protecting our Ability to Counter Hacking Act, here Patriot Act, here Pecker, David, here Pegasus (NSO Group), here, here, here Peña Nieto, Enrique, here Pentagon, here, here, here, here Perfect Forward Secrecy encryption, here Perry, William, here Petya (Soviet), here, here Pfizer

Reset

by Ronald J. Deibert · 14 Aug 2020

, journalists, and others were sent private SMS messages containing malware-laden links manufactured by one of the world’s most sophisticated spyware companies, Israel-based NSO Group. In Omar’s case, a fake DHL courier notification was the “ground zero” source of his infection; it had been sent in June 2018, only

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’s team, led by senior researchers Bill Marczak and John Scott-Railton, had been using a mix of fairly refined network monitoring methods to document NSO Group’s infrastructure, and we had (unbeknownst to either the company or its clients) a real-time bead on the number of infected devices worldwide, as

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into the devices of targeted persons. Over a decade, our research has revealed how the wares of companies like Gamma Group, Hacking Team, Cyberbit, and NSO Group have been deployed in countries with brutal track records of repression, like Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Turkmenistan, Rwanda, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, and others. These

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non-existent. Perhaps the most notorious of the spyware companies we have been tracking is widely considered to be among the most sophisticated: Israel-based NSO Group, also known as Q Technologies, a company closely aligned with the Israeli Ministry of Defence. (Far from taming abuses connected to the spyware market, Israel

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’s Ministry of Defence routinely grants export licences for NSO’s sales, as well as those of other Israel-based surveillance companies.) NSO Group first came onto our radar in August 2016, when award-winning UAE-based human rights activist Ahmed Mansoor received two text messages on his iPhone

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Citizen Lab for analysis. Clicking on those links in a laboratory setting allowed us to infect an iPhone we controlled and inspect a copy of NSO Group’s custom Pegasus spyware. The spyware was extraordinarily sophisticated; it included exploits that took advantage of three separate flaws in Apple’s operating system that

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part of an investigation into a particularly sophisticated attack that was discovered by WhatsApp’s security team in May 2019, and which they attributed to NSO Group. NSO had developed an insidious “no click” version of their spyware in which operators could take over the devices of targets simply by calling the

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reasonably assume are either private or secure, many through his desktop computer, others through his mobile device. The “intellectual property” of a spyware company like NSO Group consists of methods for taking advantage of these multiple networked connections, and finding and exploiting weak points in the constantly mutating and highly insecure digital

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thousands of well-paid, highly trained engineers to constantly scour operating systems, software, applications, hardware, platforms, routers, and networks for insecurities (in the case of NSO Group, many of them are veterans of Israel’s sophisticated Unit 8200 signals intelligence group). For their part, targets like Omar lack capacity and resources to

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largely stifled. Says Yahya Assiri — a Saudi activist exiled to the U.K. and himself a person we verified was targeted by Saudi intelligence using NSO Group’s spyware — “I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said more than 90% of the most active campaigners in 2011 have now vanished.”221 It

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shown how easy it is to unmask real identities contained in large personal data sets.268 As if unintentionally signalling these very risks, surveillance vendor NSO Group jumped into the ring, offering its services to trace the movements of known COVID-19 patients against those with whom they might have crossed paths

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mine. Although we will not announce it publicly until I leave India, we are finishing up an investigation into the Indian civil society targets of NSO Group’s sophisticated “no click” WhatsApp exploit, which allows operators of their spyware to clandestinely take over a mobile phone simply by calling it. We have

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to chat. Bowman’s questions shifted at once from financial support for refugees to the Citizen Lab and our research on Israel-based spyware firm NSO Group. Why do you write only about nso? Do you write about it because it’s an Israeli company? Do you hate Israel? As Bowman spoke

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is restricted to an “allow list” of companies that undertake thorough due diligence to prevent abuse, and thus marginalize serial abusers like Hacking Team or NSO Group. Governments in whose jurisdictions surveillance companies are located have benefited from the kind of rubber-stamp approval that Israel’s ministry of defence provides for

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NSO Group’s sales. Instead, host governments could deploy strong measures that only provide export licenses in exchange for companies taking meaningful steps, written into their sales

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, we were, in turn, watching them: Marczak, B., Scott-Railton, J., McKune, S., Abdul Razzak, B., and Deibert, R. (September 2018). “Hide and Seek: Tracking NSO Group’s Pegasus Spyware to Operations in 45 Countries,” Citizen Lab Research Report No. 113, University of Toronto. Retrieved from https://citizenlab.ca/2018/09/hide

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-and-seek-tracking-nso-groups-pegasus-spyware-to-operations-in-45-countries/; Marczak, B., Scott-Railton, J., Senft, A., Abdul Razzak, B., and Deibert, R. (October 2018). “The Kingdom Came

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Mercenaries Do Battle for Authoritarian Governments,” New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/21/us/politics/government-hackers-nso-darkmatter.html NSO Group first came onto our radar in August 2016: Marczak B. and Scott-Railton, J. (August 2016). “The Million Dollar Dissident

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: NSO Group’s iPhone Zero-Days used against a UAE Human Rights Defender,” Citizen Lab Research Report No. 78, University of Toronto. Retrieved from https://citizenlab.ca/

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2016/08/million-dollar-dissident-iphone-zero-day-nso-group-uae/ “Zero days” — or “open doors that the vendor does not know it should lock”: Lindsay, Restrained by design; Greenberg, A. (2012, March 23). Shopping

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, S., Abdul Razzak, B., Crete-Nishihata, B., and Deibert, R. (March 20, 2019). “Reckless VII: Wife of Journalist Slain in Cartel-Linked Killing Targeted with NSO Group’s Spyware,” Citizen Lab Research Report No. 117, University of Toronto. Retrieved from https://citizenlab.ca/2019/03/nso-spyware-slain-journalists-wife/ “We would

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.org/en/latest/research/2018/08/amnesty-international-among-targets-of-nso-powered-campaign/; and Marczak, B., Scott-Railton, J. and Deibert, R. (July 2018). “NSO Group Infrastructure Linked to Targeting of Amnesty International and Saudi Dissident,” Citizen Lab Research Report No. 110, University of Toronto. Retrieved from https://citizenlab.ca/2018

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Chowdhury, Nilanjan, 242, 245 Church Committee (U.S. Senate), 285, 288 Citizen Lab, 24–26 adversaries of, 251–256, 322 and Mexico, 152–153 and nso Group, 144, 152–154, 204–205, 251 reports by, 150, 204 research by, 38–39, 68–69, 85–86, 142, 152–155, 195–196 reverse engineering

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Internet Research Agency (ira), 123, 130 iPhones, 10, 219, 229–230, 247, 311, 313. See also Apple; smartphones Israel, 192, 254. See also Black Cube; nso Group iss World, 147–148 Jadali, Sam, 58–59 Jardim, Elizabeth, 240 Jio, 94, 202 Jobs, Steve, 230 Kagame, Paul, 155 Kahneman, Daniel, 109 Kaye, David

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York City Police Department, 172, 175–176 Nigeria, 120 North Korea, 17 Northrup Grumman, 181–182 Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible (Pomerantsev), 122 nso Group, 142, 150–155, 157, 159–160, 194, 254, 291 Citizen Lab and, 144, 152–154, 204–205, 251 Ntwali, Frank, 154–155 Obama, Barack, 314

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civic virtue deterioration of, 89, 112, 134, 297 social media as, 106–109, 112–113, 140 Putin, Vladimir, 120, 123 QAnon, 269 Q Technologies. See nso Group Quovo Inc., 40–41 Ramirez, Joyce, 126 Range International Information Hub, 241 ransomware, 12, 17, 84 rare earth elements, 214–221 Raytheon Co., 181–182

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, 50–52 Sony Corp., 225 Soros, George, 123 Southwest Airlines, 59 Der Spiegel, 45 spyware, 140, 142–143, 144, 150–158, 290–292. See also nso Group; surveillance industry; specific technologies SS7 (Signalling System No. 7), 18 Standard Oil, 306–307 Stingrays (cell site simulators), 190–191 Strategic Communication Laboratories/scl Group

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson · 15 May 2023 · 619pp · 177,548 words

belonged to opposition politicians, human rights activists, journalists, and dissidents who were reportedly being hacked using the Pegasus spyware developed by the Israeli tech company NSO Group (named after the first names of its founders, Niv Karmi, Shalev Hulio, and Omri Lavie). (NSO denies any wrongdoing, saying that the software is provided

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from Huxley (1958, 37). From Prometheus to Pegasus. On VK (VKontakte)’s spread and role in protests, see Enikolopov, Makarin, and Petrova (2020). On the NSO Group, see Bergman and Mazzetti (2022). The Pegasus story has been confirmed in widespread reporting by media sources that include the Washington Post, National Public Radio

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-aware-idUSKCN1MV0HI. The NSO response to Forbidden Stories appeared here: www.the guardian.com/news/2021/jul/18/response-from-nso-and-governments, beginning with “NSO Group firmly denies false claims made in your report.” NSO specifically rejected any involvement in the killing of Khashoggi: “As NSO has previously stated, our technology

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World

by Bruce Schneier · 3 Sep 2018 · 448pp · 117,325 words

Lab reported on the Mexican government’s surveillance of what it considered political threats. The country had purchased surveillance software—spyware—from the cyberweapons manufacturer NSO Group, and had used it to spy on journalists, dissidents, political opponents, international investigators, lawyers, anti-corruption groups, and people who supported a tax on soft

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tools from cyberweapons manufacturers. These are companies like FinFisher’s seller Gamma Group (Germany and the UK), HackingTeam (Italy), VASTech (South Africa), Cyberbit (Israel), and NSO Group (also Israel). They sell to countries like the ones I listed in the beginning of this section, allowing them to hack into computers, phones, and

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Aug 2017), “Reckless IV: Lawyers for murdered Mexican women’s families targeted with NSO spyware,” Citizen Lab, https://citizenlab.ca/2017/08/lawyers-murdered-women-nso-group. 64anti-corruption groups: John Scott-Railton et al. (30 Aug 2017), “Reckless V: Director of Mexican anti-corruption group targeted with

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NSO group’s spyware,” Citizen Lab, https://citizenlab.ca/2017/08/nso-spyware-mexico-corruption. 64and people who supported a tax on soft drinks: John Scott-Railton

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Howell O’Neill (20 Jun 2017), “ISS World: The traveling spyware roadshow for dictatorships and democracies,” CyberScoop, https://www.cyberscoop.com/iss-world-wiretappers-ball-nso-group-ahmed-mansoor. 66Moonlight Maze in 1999: Juan Andres Guerrero-Saade et al. (Apr 2017), “Penquin’s moonlit maze: The dawn of nation-state digital espionage

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) in, 173 and security standards, 167–70 splitting into three organizations, 172–73 supply-chain attacks by, 87 surveillance by, 65, 66–67, 190, 202 NSO Group, 65 Nye, Joseph, 157 Obama, Barack, 66, 69, 92, 117, 163, 180, 208 Ochoa, Higinio O. III, 52 offense vs. defense, see attack vs. defense

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

by Ronan Farrow · 14 Oct 2019 · 390pp · 115,303 words

to trust it wont come back at me,” Sleeper wrote. “I’m sure you know NSO so I’m not interested in taking unnecessary risks.” NSO Group was an Israeli cyber intelligence firm, famed for its Pegasus software, which could take control of a cell phone and strip-mine it for data

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cybercrime. Several had expertise in aggressive new solutions for hacking and monitoring cell phones—like the Pegasus software made by the Israeli cyber intelligence firm NSO Group, which Sleeper had worried about. Ostrovskiy said that the limited information he possessed was “designed to be traceable back to me.” He was anxious that

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, apparently. But as food arrived, Lambert’s interests strayed. Citizen Lab, which tracks state-backed efforts to hack and surveil journalists, had recently reported that NSO Group’s Pegasus software compromised an iPhone belonging to a friend of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, not long before Saudi operatives cut Khashoggi to pieces with

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a bone saw. The investigation had prompted sharp criticism of NSO Group, which denied that its software was used to target Khashoggi but also refused to answer questions about whether the software had been sold to the

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Saudi government. Lambert wanted to know about Citizen Lab’s work on NSO Group. He asked whether there was any “racist element” to the focus on an Israeli group. He pressed Scott-Railton about his views on the Holocaust

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was Aharon Almog-Assouline, a retired Israeli security official later reported to have been involved in a string of Black Cube operations. Black Cube and NSO Group would later deny any connection to the operation against Citizen Lab. But in many of the meetings Ostrovskiy had described to me over the preceding

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months, Almog-Assouline had been there, appearing to target figures who criticized NSO Group and argued that its software was being used to hunt journalists. Black Cube was furious about the botched operation. The agency ordered that everyone with

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and Youtube accounts, March 3, 2018. 2 Lambert’s interests strayed: Raphael Satter, “APNewsBreak: Undercover Agents Target Cybersecurity Watchdog,” Associated Press, January 26, 2019. 3 NSO Group’s Pegasus software compromised an iPhone: Miles Kenyon, “Dubious Denials & Scripted Spin,” Citizen Lab, April 1, 2019. 4 solicited anti-Semitic statements: Ross Marowits, “West

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology

by Anu Bradford · 25 Sep 2023 · 898pp · 236,779 words

in this domain. Surveillance technologies supplied by US firms, such as IBM, Palantir, and Cisco, can be found in 32 countries. An Israeli company called NSO Group has developed spyware called “Pegasus,” which has been described as the “World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon,” and which the company has sold to governments around

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the world.153 Reports have subsequently surfaced documenting widespread abuse of the spyware by democratic and authoritarian countries alike.154 NSO Group also became a target of US sanctions in 2021 after it was discovered that the company supplied its Pegasus spyware to foreign governments that used

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-and-law/graham-dwyer-case-eu-states-join-ireland-in-challenge-to-data-law-1.4673050. 224.See European Parliament Press Release, Pegasus: MEPs Grilled NSO Group Representatives About Spyware Abuse Allegations (June 20, 2022), https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20220620IPR33414/pegasus-meps-grilled

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-nso-group-representatives-about-spyware-abuse-allegations; see Antoaneta Roussi, EU and Greece Veer Toward Standoff Over Wiretapping Scandal, Politico (Aug. 29, 2022), https://www.politico.eu/

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the World’s Most Powerful Cyberweapon, N.Y. Times Mag., https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/28/magazine/nso-group-israel-spyware.html. 154.Id. 155.David E. Sanger et al., U.S. Blacklists Israeli Firm NSO Group Over Spyware, N.Y. Times (Nov. 3, 2021), https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/business

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/nso-group-spyware-blacklist.html. 156.Feldstein, supra note 23, at 13–14. 157.Liza Lin & Josh Chin, U.S. Tech

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North Korea, 134, 180–81, 197–98, 270–71, 274–75, 308 NPC (National People’s Congress) (China), 73–74 NSA. see National Security Agency NSO Group, 316 Nvidia, 161–62, 312 NXP, 204–5 Obama, Barack, 51, 54–55, 60, 245, 272, 285–86 Office 365 (Microsoft), 154, 261–62 Ogun

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, 281–82 PayPal, 142–43 PCAOB (Public Company Accounting and Oversight Board) (US), 96, 177–78 PDPB (Personal Data Protection Bill) (India), 335 Pegasus spyware (NSO Group), 316 Peifer, Karl-Nikolaus, 325 Pelosi, Nancy, 53, 202–3, 216–17 Peng Shuai, 84–85 People’s Daily, 84 People’s Liberation Army, 78

Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies

by Barry Meier · 17 May 2021 · 319pp · 89,192 words

malware capable of infecting the cellphones of unsuspecting users and monitoring their conversations, emails, texts, and physical location. One kingpin of that dark domain was NSO Group, an Israeli company that produced a spyware program known commonly as Pegasus. The government of Saudi Arabia had used Pegasus to infect the phones of

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” story, 156–158, 253 Simpson interview with, 69 on Steele dossier, 190, 191, 220, 235–236, 243 Nigeria, 43, 164–165 Novirex Sales, 179–180 NSO Group, 195–196, 202 Nunes, Devin, 214, 233 Obama, Barack, 2, 18, 66–68, 103, 108, 142, 158 Occidental College, 87–88 Ohr, Bruce, 139–140

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It

by Azeem Azhar · 6 Sep 2021 · 447pp · 111,991 words

software – memorably termed ‘intrusion as a service’.72 Here too, a key goal would be to ban private companies from developing malicious software. Take the NSO Group, a private firm which develops software purportedly used as spyware by malicious actors.73 Their blockbuster product is Pegasus, which allegedly targets individuals’ phones and

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/12/western-firms-should-not-sell-spyware-to-tyrants> [accessed 26 April 2021]. 74 Bill Marczak et al., ‘The Great IPwn: Journalists Hacked with Suspected NSO Group IMessage “Zero-Click” Exploit’, The Citizen Lab, 20 December 2020 <https://citizenlab.ca/2020/12/the-great-ipwn-journalists-hacked-with-suspected

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-nso-group-imessage-zero-click-exploit/> [accessed 26 April 2021]. 75 Vincen Boulanin, Limits on Autonomy in Weapons Systems (SIPRI, 2020) <https://www.sipri.org/sites/default/

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actors, 194, 213 North Korea, 198 North Macedonia, 200–201 Norway, 173, 216 NotPetya malware, 197, 199–200, 211, 213 Novell, 98 Noyce, Robert, 19 NSO Group, 214 nuclear weapons, 193, 195–6, 212, 237 Nuremberg Trials (1945–6), 208 O’Reilly, Tim, 107 O’Sullivan, Laura, 57–8, 60 Obama, Barack

Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems

by Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer, Paul Blankinship, Ana Oprea, Piotr Lewandowski and Adam Stubblefield · 29 Mar 2020 · 1,380pp · 190,710 words

the centrifuges and halt Iran’s nuclear program. Policing domestic activity Governments may also break into systems to police domestic activity. In a recent example, NSO Group, a cybersecurity contractor, sold software to various governments that allowed private surveillance of communications between people without their knowledge (through the remote monitoring of mobile

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phone calls). Reportedly, this software was intended to surveil terrorists and criminals—relatively noncontroversial targets. Unfortunately, some of NSO Group’s government customers have also used the software to listen in on journalists and activists, in some cases leading to harassment, arrest, and even possibly

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military. For example, Dutch attackers reportedly compromised the US military during the Persian Gulf War (1991) and offered stolen information to the Iraqi government. 3 NSO Group’s activities have been researched and documented by The CitizenLab, a research and policy laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy

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risks, Costs and nontechnical risks North Korea, Attacker Motivations notes, keeping during recovery, Recovery Logistics, Postmortems NotPetya ransomware, Risk Assessment Considerations NSA, Risk Assessment Considerations NSO Group, Policing domestic activity O observability, improving, Improve observability OIDC (OpenID Connect), Identities, Example: Identity model for the Google production system OL (operations lead), Establishing Your