The US Supreme Court on Monday rejected an attempt by Israeli technology group NSO to block a lawsuit filed by WhatsApp against it, accusing it of using the Facebook-owned messaging service to spy on journalists, human rights activists and others.
Court files revealed its rejection of the NSO Group’s request for judicial immunity, and it considered that the consideration of the case targeting the company’s “Pegasus” program could continue before a federal court in California.
The “Pegasus” program is the most prominent product of the group and is used to spy on mobile phones and can operate their cameras and microphones and access the data contained in them.
WhatsApp spokesperson Carl Woog said, “We are grateful that the Supreme Court dismissed NSO Group’s baseless request, and we firmly believe that NSO Group’s operations violate US law and that it should be held accountable for its illegal actions.”
In 2019, the “WhatsApp” application owned by the “Meta” company filed a lawsuit against the Israeli technology company, saying that the group tried to penetrate about 1,400 targeted devices with spyware to steal valuable information from the application’s users.
The lawsuit says that the information program developed by NSO, known as Pegasus, was designed to remotely penetrate devices using the Android, iOS and BlackBerry operating systems.
The lawsuit adds that the attackers reverse engineered the WhatsApp application and developed software that enables them to simulate legitimate WhatsApp network traffic in order to send malicious code to take over devices.
Activists say NSO has used the technology for human rights abuses.
And in 2021, Apple filed a lawsuit against the NSO Group, accusing the Israeli company of targeting its iPhones.
The Apple lawsuit came shortly after it was revealed that tens of thousands of activists, journalists and politicians were listed as potential targets of the Pegasus spyware.
