The Nso company has blocked some customers from using its Pegasus spyware

The company is also conducting an internal investigation into the misuse of the malware after the investigation that in recent weeks had linked it to the surveillance of activists, politicians and journalists around the world

(photo: Unsplash) Israeli company Nso has blocked some customers from using its Pegasus spyware and is investigating reports of misuse, according to US radio network and news site NPR. "There is a survey on some customers. Some of these customers have been temporarily suspended, ”an anonymous source inside Nso told NPR on condition of anonymity.

In recent days it emerged that the company had blocked the use of malware in recent years. five governments after conducting a "human rights check". According to the Washington Post, the suspended clients were Saudi Arabia, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and some public agencies in Mexico. The blockade has now extended to other users, still unknown.

These revelations follow pressure received by Nso after the publication of the Pegasus Project, an investigation conducted by 17 different media on the misuse of malware to control the phones of politicians, journalists and activists from around the world. The investigation was coordinated by Amnesty International.

Nso has always claimed to sell spyware to intelligence and police agencies to fight crimes such as terrorism. Nso's official clients are 60 in 40 countries, but some of them are known to watch over their citizens.

The Israeli government has also come under pressure to regulate more the sale of these technologies to other countries. Israeli officials visited Nso's office in Herzliya, near Tel Aviv on Wednesday, "to assess the allegations raised against the company," the defense ministry said in a statement.

As the site writes 9To5Mac, Nso has so far "adopted contradictory positions", on the one hand stating "that it has no way of knowing how its software is used", but on the other "denying that it was used in the cases cited by Amnesty".
Regarding the company's ongoing internal investigation, Nso has checked some of the phone numbers of people reported as potential targets for its malware. In "almost everything we checked, we found no connection to Pegasus," the anonymous employee told NPR, but refused to elaborate on the potential misuse Nso may have discovered.


Politics - 2 hours ago

We don't need the “sport ius soli”: we need the ius soli


Zoom settled in 86 million privacy lawsuit


Ecuador revoked Julian Assange's citizenship

Topics

Hacker Privacy Policy Terrorism globalData.fldTopic = "Hacker, Politics, Privacy, Terrorism"

This opera is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.