WhatsApp CEO: ‘US Allies Officials’ Targeted by NSO Spyware

WhatsApp CEO Will Cathcart claims that spyware from the Israeli NSO Group was used against high-ranking government officials in 2019, among other things. The chat service spoke about that WhatsApp attack before, but now gives more details about it.

In the attack, the smartphones of 1400 WhatsApp users were infected with spyware from the NSO Group. At least 100 users would be journalists or human rights activists. Now says WhatsApps CEO Will Cathcart to The Guardian that government officials would also be affected. This would in part concern high-ranking officials who are involved in the national security of a country. These countries are said to be allies of the United States, although specific countries are not mentioned.

Cathcart speaks to the newspaper in the context of the recent Pegasus revelations. Research by seventeen news organizations, including The Guardian, would show that Pegasus software from NSO Group was used to hack and track at least 37 journalists and human rights activists. The WhatsApp CEO says he sees “parallels” between Pegasus and the spyware used against WhatsApp. Both attacks involved tracking people who “shouldn’t have been tracked in any way,” says Cathcart.

NSO Group itself says that its spyware is only used against suspected criminals and terrorists. The company also says that the list of 50,000 users gathered by the news organizations is “exaggerated” and too large for the Pegasus spyware. The company would have a maximum of 45 customers with an average of about a hundred targets each. Cathcart says its chat service was able to identify 1,400 targets within two weeks. “That shows that the amount of individuals attacked over a period of several years must be very large,” Cathcart said. According to Cathcart, the list of fifty thousand users does not have to be ‘excessively large’.