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Distancing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government from
the alleged attempts to send malware to the mobile devices of a
number of Whatsapp users, Israeli security cabinet minister Zeev
Elkin said that if anyone had done anything "forbidden" they
could expect to find themselves in court.
"NSO is a private player using capabilities that Israelis have,
thousands of people are in the cyber field, but there is no
Israeli government involvement here, everyone understands that,
this is not about the state of Israel," Elkin told 102.FM Tel
Aviv Radio.
On Tuesday, WhatsApp sued NSO Group accusing it of helping
government spies break into the phones of roughly 1,400 users
across four continents in a hacking spree whose targets included
diplomats, political dissidents, journalists and senior
government officials.
The Facebook-owned software giant alleges that NSO Group built
and sold a hacking platform that exploited a flaw in WhatsApp-owned
servers to help clients hack into the cellphones of at least
1,400 users between April 29, 2019, and May 10, 2019.
On Thursday Reuters reported that senior government officials in
many U.S.-allied countries were targeted earlier this year with
hacking software that used WhatsApp to take over users’ phones,
according to people familiar with the messaging company’s
investigation.
NSO has denied the allegations "in the strongest possible
terms," saying it would fight them "vigorously."
WhatsApp is used by 1.5 billion people monthly and has often
touted a high level of security, including end-to-end encrypted
messages that cannot be deciphered by WhatsApp or other third
parties.
In his radio interview Elkin said "I don't see any political
fallout from this incident."
He added: "It is true that when people do things that are
forbidden - I have no way of determining whether they did indeed
do anything forbidden - then the justice system here and in
other countries will throw the book at them.
(Reporting by Dan Williams; Writing by Maayan Lubell; Editing by
Stephen Farrell and Angus MacSwan)
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