Spy company employee suspected of selling malware to monitor iPhones

A former employee of the Israeli security company NSO Group is suspected of having stolen software that can be used to monitor targets’ iPhones in detail. The suspect allegedly wanted to sell the tool on darknets.

He asked for $50 million in cryptocurrency for NSO Group’s Pegasus tool. That Israeli company is a supplier of digital weapons. The suspect worked at the company as a developer and NSO Group was considering firing him. The man, probably out of dissatisfaction, then managed to evade security to smuggle code out of the company, Motherboard writes based on the indictment.

With the source code he stole, the full functioning of the system could be traced, according to NSO Group. The company would have had to fear for its survival if the sale had been successful, the claim goes on. The suspect tried to sell the code on darknets, but a potential buyer contacted NSO Group to report the situation, after which they tracked down the employee and he was arrested.

Mexico and the United Arab Emirates, among others, would use Pegasus against dissidents, civil rights activists and journalists. The tool can jailbreak iPhones at the click of a link and install software to monitor communications from iMessage, Gmail, WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram and Skype, according to Citizen Lab.