Facebook filed a lawsuit against an Israeli company alleging its software was behind a spyware attack on journalists, human rights advocates and others
By Jeff Horwitz Oct. 29, 2019 4:05 pm ET Facebook Inc. FB -0.05% has filed a lawsuit against Israel’s NSO Group, alleging the cybersecurity company’s software infected the phones of some users with spyware it delivered through the WhatsApp messaging platform.
In the suit Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, filed Tuesday in the Northern California federal district court, the company says that NSO Group’s software was behind a sophisticated campaign to hack the phones and messages of journalists, human-rights advocates and other targets chosen by its clients, which include foreign governments.
“Unable to break WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption, Defendants developed their malware in order to access messages and other communications after they were decrypted on Target Devices,” Facebook wrote in the complaint. “Defendants reverse-engineered the WhatsApp app and developed a program to enable them to emulate legitimate WhatsApp network traffic in order to transmit malicious code—undetected—to Target Devices over WhatsApp servers.
News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a commercial agreement to supply news through Facebook.Copyright ©2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
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