According to the company, NSO Group exploited software vulnerabilities of users’ devices and installed the Pegasus Trojan program on them.
The American Apple Corporation filed a lawsuit against the Israeli company NSO Group and its parent company Q Cyber Technologies to hold them accountable for spying on users of Apple devices. The corresponding statement is published on the company’s website.
In the lawsuit, Apple provided additional information about how the NSO Group exploited software vulnerabilities of users’ devices and installed the Pegasus Trojan on them.
According to the report, Apple intends to obtain a permanent injunction against the use of NSO Group software, services, and devices of the company. In addition, Apple is seeking damages for violating U.S. federal laws, as well as the laws of American states.
In September, Apple announced the release of an update for the iPhone 6 and all later generations of phones, as well as all tablets of the company. It was designed to eliminate vulnerabilities that allowed malware to gain control of the phone bypassing user actions. One of the problems was discovered by The Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity research group at the University of Toronto in Canada. According to her information, this particular vulnerability exploiting security flaws when working with PDF files was used by the Israeli company NSO Group when creating the Pegasus spyware.
The Citizen Lab claims that the vulnerability made it possible to gain control not only over phones and tablets but also over Apple computers running on the macOS operating system. The researchers claim that the vulnerability has been known to hackers since February 2021 and since that time could be used for their purposes.
In July, the Forbidden Stories website and 17 media outlets from various states published the results of a journalistic investigation, according to which a number of countries could be spying on at least 50 thousand people around the world using the Israeli Pegasus system. The targets of surveillance could be heads of states, governments, and international organizations, including French President Emmanuel Macron.
