The NSO spyware group will have to pay more than $ 167 million in damage to WhatsApp for a 2019 hacking campaign against over 1,400 users.
On Tuesday, after a five -year legal battle, a jury has established that the NSO group must pay $ 167,256,000 in punitive damage and approximately $ 444,719 in compensatory damage.
This is a huge legal victory for WhatsApp, who had asked for more than $ 400,000 in compensatory damage, based on the moment in which its employees had to devote themselves to correcting attacks, investigating them and pushing the corrections to rattle the vulnerability abused by the NSO group, as well as unspecified punitive damage.
The WhatsApp spokesman Zade Alsawah has declared in a declaration that “our judicial case made history as the first victory against illegal spyware that threatens everyone’s security and privacy”.
Alsawah has said that the sentence “is an important step forward for privacy and security as the first victory against the development and use of illegal spyware that threaten everyone’s security and privacy. Today, the decision of the jury of Force NSO, a notorious foreign spyware trader, to pay the damage, to pay the critical damage for this critical cleaner for this mischievous industry against their illegal acts. aimed at American companies and foreign security for the service.
The spokesman for the NSO Gil Lainer group left the door open for an appeal.
“We will carefully examine the details of the verdict and pursue adequate legal remedies, including further procedures and an appeal,” Lainer said in a note.
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The process, as well as the entire cause, aroused a series of revelations, such as the position of the victims of the 2019 spyware campaign, as well as the names of some of the customers of the NSO group.
The sentence marks the end – pending a potential appeal – of a legal battle that began more than five years ago, when WhatsApp has filed a cause against the Spyware manufacturer. The Meta-Di Properties company has accused the NSO group of accessing WhatsApp servers and of having exploited an audio-call vulnerability in the chat app for target about 1,400 people, including dissidents, human rights activists and journalists.
Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, explained the reasoning of the cause in a Washington Post Op-edit at the time, in which he said that “this should serve as alarm bell for technological companies, governments and all internet users. Tools that allow surveillance in our private lives are abuse
Last December, Whatsapp won. Judge Phyllis Hamilton, who chaired the case, established that the NSO group was responsible for violating the federal laws and California in his 2019 spyware campaign against the 1,400 WhatsApp users. The judge established that the NSO group was also responsible for violating the terms of service of WhatsApp, who prohibit the use of the app for harmful purposes.
Cathcart celebrated the December sentence by saying in a X post that was “a great victory for privacy” and that “surveillance companies should be noticed that illegal espionage will not be tolerated”.
At that point, the case went to a jury trial to determine what damage the spyware company had to WhatsApp, who has now concluded.
John Scott-Railton, Senior researcher from Citizen Lab, where he studied the spyware industry for more than a decade, celebrated the sentence.
“This is an incredible moment for those of us who have been in circulation since the beginning of the research on the mercenary spyware,” said Scott-Railton in Techcrunch. “NSO makes many millions of dollars who help dictators to hack people. After years of every make -up and tactical delay, the jury took only one day resolution to see to the heart of the matter: the affairs of NSO are based on the hacking of American companies … so that the dictators can hack dissidents”.
“The company emerges from this seriously damaged process. Apart from the enormous punitive damage, the greatest impact of this case was also a serious blow to NSO’s efforts to hide their commercial activities,” said Scott-Railton.
This story has been updated to include WhatsApp comments and John Scott-Railton.
