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Messaging platform WhatsApp has filed a lawsuit against an Israeli spyware vendor, accusing it of carrying secret attacks on human rights activists, lawyers, journalists and academics from twenty countries around the world.
The Facebook-owned application believes that Israeli technology firm NSO has been behind several cyber-attacks that targeted 100 activists in two weeks earlier this year, the Guardian reports.
WhatsApp’s lawsuit was filed, Tuesday, in a California court, demanding «a permanent injunction blocking NSO from attempting to access WhatsApp computer systems and those of its parent company, Facebook», the British newspaper revealed on the same day.
The company, which has been working with research laboratory Citizen Lab to identify the victims, said that 1,400 of its users were targeted by these «sophisticated cyber-attacks». It also stressed that these infamous attacks were mainly targeting human rights defenders, lawyers, religious figures, journalists and humanitarian organizations from the «end of April to the middle of May».
«Hacked» Moroccan human rights defenders
«Human rights groups have documented a disturbing trend that such tools have been used to attack journalists and human rights defenders», a WhatsApp spokesperson said.
London-based NGO Amnesty International was one of these human rights groups that addressed the attacks of the Israeli spyware group in a recent investigation. The whistleblower mainly referred in its investigation, published earlier in October, to two Moroccan human rights defenders, who have allegedly been victims of NSO’s attacks.
After checking their devices, Amnesty concluded that human rights defender, historian and columnist Maati Monjib and former Hirak Abdessadak El Bouchattaoui were «repeatedly targeted with malicious messages that carried links to websites connected to NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware».
Amnesty International was not the only body that includes Morocco in the list of countries targeted by the Israeli spyware. In a previous survey conducted by Citizen Lab, it was revealed that «suspected NSO Pegasus infections associated with 33 Pegasus operators» were identified in several African countries, including Morocco.
Citizen Lab, which collaborated with WhatsApp to establish the number of attacks carried by NSO, stressed in its investigation that Morocco is one of the countries where «significant Pegasus operations have previously been linked to abusive use of spyware to target civil society».
While WhatsApp said that it is approaching members of civil society who were affected by the alleged hacks, Israel’s NSO denied all allegations.
In a recent statement the spyware vendor said that its «sole purpose is to provide technology to licensed government intelligence and law enforcement agencies to help them fight terrorism and serious crime».
