A lawsuit has revealed for the first time that it was not the government clients but the Israeli firm NSO which extracted information from the targets' phones and other devices using its Pegasus spyware.
The revelation came through legal documents shared by NSO during a lawsuit filed by Facebook-owned WhatsApp against the Israeli firm in 2019 in a US court.
The company accepted that it "installs and extracts" information from the targets' mobile phones through Pegasus, reported The Guardian.
The details were revealed in sworn depositions from NSO Group employees, parts of which were published for the first time on Thursday.
Pegasus hit the local headlines for the first time in 2019 when scores of Indian politicians and activists were allegedly hit by sophisticated spyware, which later turned out to be a creation of the Israeli firm NSO.
In July this year, Apple sent a message to iPhone users in at least 98 countries – including India – with a warning of potential mercenary spyware attacks – its second such notification in the year.
Earlier in March, a US court mandated the Israeli cyber weapons maker to provide its code for Pegasus and other spyware products to WhatsApp.
The code for NSO's Pegasus and other surveillance products is considered a closely guarded state secret. NSO is subject to strict regulation by the Israeli Ministry of Defense, which oversees and approves the sale of all licences to foreign governments.
During the lawsuit, NSO, however, maintained that its employees did not have access to the clients' data.
"NSO stands behind its previous statements in which we repeatedly detailed that the system is operated solely by our clients and that neither NSO nor its employees have access to the intelligence gathered by the system," a spokesperson for NSO, Gil Lainer, said in a statement, according to The Guardian.
"We are confident that these claims, like many others in the past, will be proven wrong in court, and we look forward to the opportunity to do so," he added.
However, NSO's own employees' depositions belied the claim.
One of them in their deposition said the client only needed to enter the phone number of the target and "the rest is done automatically by the system."
NSO also insists that it sells its spyware only to government clients, or countries and their law enforcement authorities, to prevent serious crimes.
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