NSO Group spyware used to hack US govt employees: Sources
Washington, Dec 4: The phones of 11 US State Department employees were hacked using technology from Israel's NSO Group, the world's most infamous hacker-for-hire company, a person familiar with the matter said Friday.
The employees were all located in Uganda and included some foreign service officers, said the person, who was not authorised to speak publicly about an ongoing investigation. Some local Ugandan employees of the department appear to have been among the 11 hacked, the person said.
The hacking is the first known instance of NSO Group's spyware, known as Pegasus, being used against US government personnel.
It was not known what individual or entity used the NSO technology to hack into the accounts, or what information was sought.
We have been acutely concerned that commercial spyware like NSO Group software poses a serious counterintelligence and security risk to US personnel, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at briefing Friday.
News of the hacks, which were first reported by Reuters, comes a month after the US Commerce Department blacklisted NSO Group, barring US technology from being used by the company.
And Apple sued NSO Group last week seeking to effectively shut down its hacking of all iPhones and other Apple products, calling the Israeli company amoral 21st century mercenaries."
The State Department employees were hacked on their iPhones, the person familiar with the matter said.
NSO Group said in a statement that it had terminated the relevant customers' access to its hacking system, but did not say who the customers were. The company said its spying technology is blocked from hacking phones based in the US and only sells to licensed customers.
NSO has no way to know who the targets of the customers are, as such, we were not and could not have been aware of this case, the company said.
In announcing the lawsuit, Apple sent out notifications globally to people whose iPhones were hacked with Pegasus in countries ranging from El Salvador to Poland. The targeted State Department employees were among them.
Apple declined comment Friday on the Uganda hacks.
Marketed to governments for use solely against terrorists and criminals, Pegasus has been abused by NSO customers to spy on human rights activists, journalists and politicians from Saudi Arabia to Mexico, including such high-profile targets as the fiancee of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist murdered in his country's consulate in Istanbul.
NSO Group has been broadly denounced for allowing such targeting, and its placement on the Commerce Department's "entity list last month was the first time a company outside of China had been added over human rights violations, said Kevin Wolf, an attorney at Akin Gump and former top commerce official in the Obama administration.
Analysts wonder whether NSO Group can survive financially under such circumstances. Last week, Moody's downgraded NSO Group's financial outlook to negative, saying it risked defaulting on more than USD 300 million in loans as a result of high uncertainty of its ability to sell new licenses. It said NSO Group, which is privately held, has about 750 employees with 60 customers in more than 35 countries.
The impact on companies blacklisted by the Commerce Department, about half of which are Chinese, is often far broader than barring them from using US technology.
Wolf said many companies choose to avoid doing business with them completely in order to eliminate the risk of an inadvertent violation and the legal costs of analyzing whether they can.
NSO Group was asked by The Associated Press prior to Friday's news whether it could survive as long as it is on the entity list. While not directly responding, it said it was working on all appropriate channels to reverse the Department of Commerce's decision.
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If Cong high command has to decide on leadership, they should do it before Feb: Parameshwara
Bengaluru (PTI): Karnataka Home Minister G Parameshwara on Tuesday said that if the Congress high command has to decide anything on the leadership issue, they should do it before the budget preparation in February.
He said, whether the leadership should be changed or not will be decided by the Congress high command.
"The budget preparation will begin in February, Roughly one more month. If the high command has to decide anything on this issue, they should decide before that," Parameshwara said in response to a question on the leadership issue.
Speaking to reporters here, he said, "Someone will have to prepare the budget, right? The budget has to be presented based on the assurance we have given to the people of the state. It will be done."
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To a question regarding some people staging a demonstration in Delhi, during the recent Congress Working Committee meeting, demanding that Prameshwara be made the CM, the Home minister said, "Those who say that Prameshwara should become CM, they would have said it out of affection towards me. How can I tell them not to say such things? You seem to be suggesting that I should tell them not to say such things."
On reports of a team of Congress leaders meeting AICC General Secretary K C Venugopal in Delhi, with a demand to make Parameshwara CM in case of leadership change, he said, "The Congress high command will have all the information. They will take information from the general secretary, and they also gather information in their own way."
"They know what has to be decided and when. Whether the leadership should be changed or not. All of this will be decided by them," he added.
Parameshwara, who had served as state Congress chief in the past, had himself last month said that he too was in the race to become the CM. Also, there has been demand for a "Dalit CM" within the Congress in case of leadership change, with Parameshwara as one of the prime contenders.
There have been speculations within the party circles too about Siddaramaiah's faction preferring Parameshwara or other senior leaders among them for the CM post, in case of any changes.
Asked about Congress MLA Iqbal Hussain's statement that there is a 200 per cent chance for Deputy CM D K Shivakumar to become the chief minister of the state on January 6 or 9, Parameshwara jokingly said, "Once Iqbal Hussain has said it is final. Whether I accept it or not is not the question."
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Amid the leadership issue, Siddaramaiah, on December 19, had asserted on the floor of the Assembly that he would continue in office. He had also said that the Congress high command was in his favour and asserted that no decision was made on his staying at the helm for only two-and-a-half years.
Reacting to this, Shivakumar had said that he and CM Siddaramaiah have come to an agreement with the involvement of the Congress high command, and both of them will abide by it.
