WhatsApp says Israeli spyware company Paragon targeted scores of users
Company official says it sent cease-and-desist letter following hack; Israeli firm declines to respond to allegation
An official with Meta’s popular WhatsApp chat service has said Israeli spyware company Paragon Solutions targeted scores of its users, including journalists and members of civil society.
The official said on Friday that WhatsApp had sent Paragon a cease-and-desist letter following the hack. In a statement, WhatsApp said the company “will continue to protect people’s ability to communicate privately.”
Paragon declined to comment.
The WhatsApp official told Reuters it had detected an effort to hack approximately 90 users of its platform.
The official declined to say who, specifically, was targeted or where they were geographically, saying only that targets included an unspecified number of people in civil society and media. He said WhatsApp had since disrupted the hacking effort and was referring targets to Canadian internet watchdog group Citizen Lab.
The official declined to discuss how it ascertained that Paragon was responsible for the hack. He said law enforcement and industry partners had been informed, but declined to go into detail.
The FBI did not immediately return a message seeking comment.
Citizen Lab researcher John Scott-Railton said the discovery of Paragon spyware targeting WhatsApp users “is a reminder that mercenary spyware continues to proliferate and as it does, so we continue to see familiar patterns of problematic use.”
Paragon is a rival of Israeli cyber-hacking firm NSO group, the maker of the controversial Pegasus software.
The Tel Aviv startup was founded in 2019 by former IDF elite intelligence unit 8200 commander Ehud Schneorson, CEO Idan Nurick, CTO Igor Bogudlov and Chief Research Officer Liad Abraham and has former prime minister Ehud Barak sitting on its board. Among its main investors are US-based venture capital firm Battery Ventures and Israeli venture capital fund Red Dot.
Paragon describes itself as a startup that provides its clients with “ethically based tools to disrupt intractable threats, cyber and forensic capabilities to locate and analyze digital data, cyber workforce training, and critical infrastructure analysis, and threat mitigation.”
Sharon Wrobel contributed to this report.
