At least nine U.S. State Department employees had their iPhones hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
The Pegasus spyware is NSO's best-known product. It can be covertly installed on mobile devices running most versions of iOS and Android. The malware is capable of capturing encrypted messages, photos and other sensitive information from infected phones, tracking calls, collecting passwords, location tracking, accessing the target device's microphone and camera, and harvesting information from apps.
According to the sources, the attacks, which were carried out in the last several months, targeted U.S. officials either based in Uganda or focused on matters concerning the East African country. Reuters was unable to determine who was behind the hacks. A State Department, as well as officials at the Uganda embassy in Washington declined to comment on the report.
An NSO Group’s spokesperson told Reuters that the company will investigate the matter. The Israeli spyware vendor has repeatedly stressed that it only sells its products to government law enforcement and intelligence clients to help them detect and prevent terrorism and crime and is not directly involved in surveillance operations.
In November 2021, the U.S. Department of Commerce placed NSO and another Israeli spyware firm, Candiru, on a trade blacklist for selling spyware to countries with totalitarian regimes or with a record of violating human rights.
The same month, American tech giant Apple filed a lawsuit against Israeli surveillance-for-hire company NSO Group and its parent company Q Cyber Technologies “to hold it accountable” for illegally targeting Apple users with its powerful Pegasus spyware.
Following this, the Israeli Ministry of Defense reduced the number of countries that Israeli companies can export offensive hacking and surveillance tech to from 102 to 37.