NSO Group Owes Meta $167 Million In Damages For Using WhatsApp Servers To Deliver Malware

from the going-to-have-to-hold-a-bake-sale-or-something dept We’ll have to see if NSO Group has this sort of cash just laying around. Seems unlikely, what with its financial backers pulling out in response to a steady stream of negative headlines, as well as the company considering exiting the highly-profitable offensive malware market. Sure, this will be appealed and NSO will try to get the awarded damages trimmed down to a more manageable number, but for now, this is what NSO Group owes Meta, the parent company of WhatsApp: NSO Group, the Israeli spyware-maker behind Pegasus, must pay Meta $167.25 million for hacking 1,400 users across WhatsApp. A federal jury in California made the decision on Tuesday after the court found the NSO Group liable for the attacks last year. […] The jury also awarded Meta $444,719 in compensatory damages. John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab has a pretty thorough rundown of this litigation over at Bluesky. Citizen Lab, of course, has been instrumental in revealing abusive deployments of NSO Group’s Pegasus malware by some of its shadier customers. And Citizen Lab has been targeted by some of NSO’s investors in hopes of stopping the self-inflicted bleeding the Israeli malware maker endured over the past four years. A settlement
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