ISLAMABAD – Senior government officials from a number of US-alliedcountries appear to have been targeted earlier this year with software usedto hack Facebook-managed WhatsApp to covertly gain access to users’ phones,according to people familiar with the investigation, as cited by Reuters.
The sources specified that a “significant” part of the already knownvictims are high-profile government and military officials from at least 20countries on five continents – the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Mexico,Pakistan and India, to name a few.
The apparent breach led WhatsApp to lodge a lawsuit on Tuesday againstIsraeli hacking tool developer NSO Group, with the messaging servicealleging that NSO Group built and sold a whole hacking platform that couldutilise a flaw in WhatsApp servers to help its clients hack into thesmartphones of at least 1,400 users.
While it has yet to be determined who used the software to hack theofficials’ phones, NSO noted it sells spyware solely to governmentcustomers to assist them in their hunt for criminals and terrorists.
While NSO did not immediately respond to a request for comment, anindependent research group working with WhatsApp – CitizenLab- noted atleast 100 of the victims are journalists and dissidents, not criminals.
“It is an open secret that many technologies branded for law enforcementinvestigations are used for state-on-state and political espionage,” JohnScott-Railton, a senior researcher with CitizenLab said about the incident.
Meanwhile, WhatsApp said it had sent warning notifications to affectedusers earlier this week, before the revelation hit media headlines, havingchecked the target list prior to that against existing law enforcementenquiries for data pertaining to grave offenders and criminals.
The messaging giant said no overlapping had been traced, while at the sametime not specifying the clients that NSO had sold its software to in orderfor it to be used against said individuals.
The revelation comes amid a whole range of controversies that WhatsApp’sumbrella company, Facebook, has found itself embroiled in over the past fewyears. The infamous Cambridge Analytica scandal unleashedlinkintensescrutiny over Facebook’s data security policies and personal info leaks,which have been over the past month overshadowed by the political adsscandal. In the latter one, Facebook quietly revised its political contentpolicielink,refusing to follow Twitter’s lead and banish political ads from theplatform, claiming it’s up to netizens to pick and choose which politicalgroups to trust, Sputnik has reported.