JERUZALEM, May 14 -- As Apple rolled out an advertising campaign last month touting the impenetrability of the iPhone — “Privacy. That’s iPhone”, the commercials promised a secretive Israeli company called in its sales people to talk about an important update designed to thwart that very privacy. According to one person at the meeting, the executives from NSO Group made a bold claim: using just one simple missed call on WhatsApp, it had figured out a way to “drop its payload”, a piece of software called Pegasus that can penetrate the darkest secrets of any iPhone. Within minutes of the missed call, the phone starts revealing its encrypted content, mirrored on a computer screen halfway across the world. It then transmits back the most intimate details such as private messages or location, and even turns on the camera and microphone to live-stream meetings. The software itself is not new — it was the latest upgrade to a decade-old technology so powerful that the Israeli defence ministry regulates its sale. But the WhatsApp hack was an enticing new “attack vector”, the person says. “Great from a sales point.” It was an illustration of the sales pitch that NSO has made to governments around the world — and which have helped give a tiny and discreet company a market valuation of around $1bn. NSO’s few hundred engineers claim they have managed to manoeuvre around whatever obstacle Apple, the world’s most valuable company, has thrown in its way. Apple declined to comment for this article. At an investor presentation in London in April, the company bragged that the typical security patches from Apple do not address the “weaknesses exploited by Pegasus”, according to an unimpressed potential investor. Despite the annual software updates unveiled by companies such as Apple, NSO had a “proven record” of identifying new weaknesses, the company representative told attendees. NSO’s pitch has been a runaway success — allowing governments to buy off the shelf the sort of software that was once thought to be restricted to only the most sophisticated spy agencies, such as GCHQ in the UK and the National Security Agency in America. The sale of such powerful and controversial technologies also gives Israel an important diplomatic calling card. Through Pegasus, Israel has acquired a major presence — official or not — in the deeply classified war rooms of unlikely partners, including, researchers say, Gulf states such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Although both countries officially reject the existence of the Jewish state, they now find themselves the subject of a charm offensive by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that mixes a shared hostility to Iran with intelligence knowhow. The Israeli government has never talked publicly about its relationship with NSO. Shortly after he stepped down as defence minister in November, Avigdor Lieberman, who had responsibility for regulating NSO’s sales, said: “I am not sure now is the right time to discuss this . . . I think that I have a responsibility for the security of our state, for future relations.” But he added: “It is not a secret today that we have contact with all the moderate Arab world. I think it is good news.” The NSO Group says Pegasus has been used by dozens of countries to prevent terrorist attacks, infiltrate drug cartels and help rescue kidnapped children. But two lawsuits against the company, which have been filed in Israel and Cyprus and build on investigations by human rights groups, claim they tracked the software to the phones of journalists, dissidents and critics of governments from Mexico to Saudi Arabia, including a researcher at Amnesty International, the wife of a murdered Mexican journalist and anti-corruption activists. As the company has grown in influence, it has been tracked by researchers at the University of Toronto who have shadowed Pegasus. They believe it has been used in 45 countries including Bahrain, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Half the group’s revenues come from the Middle East, according to an investor at the April presentation, although the company told the gathering that it had contracts with 21 EU countries. NSO’s technology has become a trophy weapon in the rivalries that consume the Middle East. The Israeli lawsuit says the UAE, an NSO client, asked a company representative to hack the mobile phones of Qatar’s emir, a rival Saudi prince and the editor of a dissident newspaper in London. The murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post columnist, in Istanbul by Saudi government hitmen brought deeper scrutiny of the company.
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