Whatsapp announces suing surveillance company NSO Group

Whatsapp has announced having filed a complaint in federal court attributing a cyberattack on its platform to a company called NSO Group. In May, Whatsapp had detected and blocked a cyberattack involving a vulnerability in its video-calling feature. In an opinion piece in the Washington Post, Will Cathcart, the head of the company, indicated that this attack targeted at least 100 human-rights defenders, journalists and other members of civil society across the world, and that “this should serve as a wake-up call for technology companies, governments and all Internet users”. According to TechCrunch, the attack involved disguising the malicious code as call settings, allowing the surveillance outfit to deliver the code as if it came from WhatsApp’s signalling servers.