Israel mediated sales of NSO spyware to UAE, other Gulf nations – report

The Israeli government mediated the sale of spyware made by the Israeli firm NSO Group to the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf nations, the Haaretz daily reports.

According to the report, there have been sales worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the past few years to Gulf countries. Those nations, according to the report, are handled by a special department within NSO that is the most profitable in the company.

“A product that you sell in Europe for 10 million dollars you can sell in the Gulf for 10 times that,” Haaretz quotes one source as saying.

The report says that NSO Group has contracts with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, and the emirates Abu Dhabi and Ras al Khaimah. It says that the company uses codes to designate those countries — names of car companies that share a first letter with the name of the country, so that, for example, Saudi Arabia is designated Subaru, Jordan is called Jaguar, and Bahrain is BMW.

The company’s Pegasus software allows agents to effectively take control of a phone through the WhatsApp application, surreptitiously controlling its cameras and microphones from remote servers and vacuuming up personal data and geolocations.

WhatsApp is suing NSO Group, accusing it of using the Facebook-owned messaging service to conduct cyber-espionage on journalists, human rights activists and others. The accounts said to have been targeted included those of senior government officials, journalists, and human rights activists worldwide.

The spyware has been implicated in the gruesome killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was dismembered in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in a 2018 incident that has also been linked to the crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.