



NSO Group was asked by The Associated Press prior to Friday’s news whether it could survive as long as it is on the entity list. Wolf said many companies choose to avoid doing business with them completely “in order to eliminate the risk of an inadvertent violation” and the legal costs of analyzing whether they can. The impact on companies blacklisted by the Commerce Department, about half of which are Chinese, is often far broader than barring them from using U.S. It said NSO Group, which is privately held, has about 750 employees with 60 customers in more than 35 countries Last week, Moody’s downgraded NSO Group’s financial outlook to negative, saying it risked defaulting on more than $300 million in loans as a result of “high uncertainty” of its ability to sell new licenses. NSO Group has been broadly denounced for allowing such targeting, and its placement on the Commerce Department’s "entity list” last month was the first time a company outside of China had been added over human rights violations, said Kevin Wolf, an attorney at Akin Gump and former top commerce official in the Obama administration.Īnalysts wonder whether NSO Group can survive financially under such circumstances. Marketed to governments for use solely against terrorists and criminals, Pegasus has been abused by NSO customers to spy on human rights activists, journalists and politicians from Saudi Arabia to Mexico, including such high-profile targets as the fiancee of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist murdered in his country’s consulate in Istanbul. We reviewed hundreds of pages of police reports, criminal case filings and court data related to intimate partner violence in Connecticut. And Apple sued NSO Group last week seeking to effectively shut down its hacking of all iPhones and other Apple products, calling the Israeli company “amoral 21st century mercenaries.” technology from being used by the company. Commerce Department blacklisted NSO Group, barring U.S. News of the hacks, which were first reported by Reuters, comes a month after the U.S. There is no exceptionalism when it comes to American phones in diplomats' pockets.” government in this very direct and unfortunate way. “For years we have seen that diplomats around the world are among targets,” he said, “and it looks like the message had to be brought home to the U.S. Senior researcher John Scott-Railton of Citizen Lab, the public-interest sleuths at the University of Toronto who have been tracking Pegasus infections for years, called the discovery a giant wake-up call for the U.S. personnel,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at briefing Friday.
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“We have been acutely concerned that commercial spyware like NSO Group software poses a serious counterintelligence and security risk to U.S. It was not known what individual or entity used the NSO technology to hack into the accounts, or what information was sought.
