On Tuesday, WhatsApp scored a major victory against NSO Group when a jury ordered the infamous spyware maker to pay more than $167 million in damages to the Meta-owned company.
The ruling concluded a legal battle spanning more than five years, which started in October 2019 when WhatsApp accused NSO Group of hacking more than 1,400 of its users by taking advantage of a vulnerability in the chat app’s audio-calling functionality.
The verdict came after a week-long jury trial that featured several testimonies, including NSO Group’s CEO Yaron Shohat and WhatsApp employees who responded and investigated the incident.
Even before the trial began, the case had unearthed several revelations, including that NSO Group had cut off 10 of its government customers for abusing its Pegasus spyware, the locations of 1,223 of the victims of the spyware campaign, and the names of three of the spyware maker’s customers: Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Uzbekistan.
TechCrunch read the transcripts of the trial’s hearings and is highlighting the most interesting facts and revelations that came out. We will update this post as we learn more from the cache of more than 1,000 pages.
Testimony described how the WhatsApp attack worked
The zero-click attack, which means the spyware required no interaction from the target, “worked by placing a fake WhatsApp phone call to the target,” as WhatsApp’s lawyer Antonio Perez said during the trial. The lawyer explained that NSO Group had built what it called the “WhatsApp Installation Server,” a special machine designed to send malicious messages across WhatsApp’s infrastructure mimicking real messages.
“Once received, those messages would trigger the user’s phone to reach out to a third server and download the Pegasus spyware. The only thing they needed to make this happen was the phone number,” said Perez.
NSO Group’s research and development vice president Tamir Gazneli testified that “any zero-click solution whatsoever is a significant milestone for Pegasus.”
NSO Group confirms it targeted an American phone number as a test for the FBI
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Do you have more information about NSO Group, or other spyware companies? From a non-work device and network, you can contact Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai securely on Signal at +1 917 257 1382, or via Telegram and Keybase @lorenzofb, or email.
For years, NSO Group has claimed that its spyware cannot be used against American phone numbers, meaning any cell number that starts with the +1 country code.
In 2022, The New York Times first reported that the comp …