‘Facebook wanted to buy spyware from NSO Group to track VPN users’

Facebook allegedly tried to buy tools from the controversial NSO Group to track some of its users. This concerns users who had the Onavo VPN installed. Facebook wanted to follow it with the Pegasus spyware, says NSO.

Two high-ranking Facebook employees are said to have contacted the Israeli spy company NSO in October 2017. That sells spyware to governments, such as zerodays for Android. The company also made the infamous Pegasus spyware, a tool to jailbreak iPhones and install malware on them. Facebook asked NSO in 2017 whether it could use certain parts of Pegasus to monitor users, according to documents from a lawsuit. In those documents, NSO CEO Shalev Hulio says that Facebook wanted to use the tools with users of Onavo Protect. That controversial app was a VPN that eavesdropped on telephone data such as private messages and internet traffic. Facebook paid users vouchers to install the app. It did that to keep an eye on which competing apps were rising in popularity. According to court documents, the Facebook employees would not want to use the app to directly tap phones. They would just like to use parts of the Pegasus tool to more efficiently read data from iPhones for users who already had the Onavo tool installed. Facebook would have suggested paying for every Onavo user who had it.

According to the documents, NSO would have refused the sale itself. The company says it only sells its tools to governments, and not to private companies such as Facebook. The statements were made in a lawsuit that Facebook’s subsidiary WhatsApp has filed against the NSO Group. NSO would have used its spyware against WhatsApp, among other things. Facebook has not yet responded to the story.