The company allegedly at the centre of a spyware attack using a vulnerability in WhatsApp’s security features has previously been flagged as being linked to spyware infections in South Africa.
A 2018 report titled ‘Hide and Seek’ published by The Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto in Canada, which helped to uncover the recent WhatsApp breach, identified 45 countries — including South Africa and other African nations — withPegasus — a tool that can turn on a phone’s microphone and camera, allowing an attacker to monitor a target’s calls, emails and contacts — was developed by Israeli technology firm NSO...
WhatsApp, which is used by 1.5-billion people, is owned by Facebook, which has come under fire in recent years for its own porous privacy policies.The vulnerability reportedly enabled attackers to install surveillance software on smartphones by ringing up targets using the app’s phone call function.In August last year,reported that the NSO group is at the centre of two lawsuits accusing the company of actively participating in illegal spying.
According to the New York Times article, the technology used by the NSO affiliate works by sending text messages to a target’s phone, hoping to bait the person into clicking on them. If the user does, Pegasus is secretly downloaded. It works on phones running Android, BlackBerry OS, and iOS operating software..
“So the public is in a situation where we know that these things happen. We know that in other places they have been abused. We know that there are traces of foreign-made software in our networks. But we actually have no clarity on who is doing it, what guidelines they are governed by and what is spent on it.”
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