07-05-2025
Meta suit against Israel's NSO offers insight into world of cyberespionage
Israel's NSO Group was handed a $168m (R3.07bn) penalty by a federal jury in California on Tuesday for hijacking the servers of WhatsApp in order to hack users of the Meta-owned chat platform on behalf of foreign spy agencies.
The case caps a six-year battle between the American social media giant and the surveillance firm. It has also cast a unusual amount of light on the inner workings of the spyware industry. Here is what we have learnt:
Top-shelf spyware is not cheap
Between 2018 and 2020 NSO charged its European government customers a "standard price" of $7m (R128m) for use of its platform to hack 15 different devices at a time, according to Sarit Bizinsky Gil, NSO's vice-president of global business operations.
The executive said the ability to hack a phone outside the customer's country was a separate add-on worth approximately $1m (R18.3m) or $2m (R36.6m).
"It is a highly sophisticated product," Meta lawyer Antonio Perez told the court in his opening statement, "And it carries a hefty price tag."
NSO hacked thousands of devices
Between 2018 and 2020 the Israeli spyware firm was responsible for breaking into thousands of devices, according to Tamir Gazneli, NSO's vice-president of research and development.
