NSO Group, the maker of one the world’s most sophisticated cyber weapons, has been ordered by a US court to hand its code for Pegasus and other spyware products to WhatsApp as part of the company’s ongoing litigation.
NSO Group has been ordered to hand over the Pegasus malware code that allows them to silently infect phones via WhatsApp, so Meta can fix it. This isn’t NSO Group being forced to hand over WhatsApp source code.
There will be at most 5 software developers who have access to the code, on a non-networked machine, surrounded by a group of lawyers the entire time. No one will have the ability to leak the Pegasus code. After that, it will probably be handed to the random mormon-looking plainclothes guy nobody in the room can figure out, who will take it back to the NSA so they can scour it for any non-WhatsApp 0days they don’t already have.
It’s worth noting that NSO Group is an Israeli company, as are many ‘legal’ entities of hacking software and hardware used by many nations.
First sentence of the article:
NSO Group has been ordered to hand over the Pegasus malware code that allows them to silently infect phones via WhatsApp, so Meta can fix it. This isn’t NSO Group being forced to hand over WhatsApp source code.
There will be at most 5 software developers who have access to the code, on a non-networked machine, surrounded by a group of lawyers the entire time. No one will have the ability to leak the Pegasus code. After that, it will probably be handed to the random mormon-looking plainclothes guy nobody in the room can figure out, who will take it back to the NSA so they can scour it for any non-WhatsApp 0days they don’t already have.
It’s worth noting that NSO Group is an Israeli company, as are many ‘legal’ entities of hacking software and hardware used by many nations.