The spyware firm tied to an iPhone hack that prompted an emergency patch this week by Apple keeps a very
low profile. But the NSO Group has strong ties here as well as in Israel, where it's staffed by specialists from Israel's military cyber division.One of its recent owners, U.S. private equity firm Francisco Partners, operates from an office complex in San Francisco's leafy Presidio district that's also home to Lucasfilm and Industrial Light & Magic.In Herzelia, an area of near Tel Aviv with a thriving tech culture, NSO was founded by Shalev Hulio and Omri Lavie in 2009, according to HulioandLavie's LinkedIn pages. Several of its employees previously worked for United 8200, the Israeli Army's cyber division, which is known to produce spying software.
The tech company's background, pieced together from industry reports, reflects the growing boom in cybersecurity firms that operate in a nebulous area: creating software and processes that break into encrypted devices for government entities.
NSO is described itself as "a leader in the field of Cyber warfare," according to an apparent company brochure posted online by Privacy International.The company uses "a powerful and unique monitoring tool, called Pegasus, which allows remote and stealth monitoring and full data extraction from remote target devices via untraceable commands," says the brochure.While these hacks can be legal under the laws of the country buying the product, they raise severe privacy worries from consumer groups. They also highlight concerns that increasingly rigorous encryption from Apple and other consumer tech companies is vulnerable to attacks funded by deep-pocked entities.
“What most people don’t understand about espionage these days is just how dramatically sophisticated the technologies to conduct this kind of intelligence gathering have become," said Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University and the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia.
Cybersecurity firms that can thwart encryption shot into the spotlight earlier this year when the FBI hired an unnamed private contractor to help it hack into the contents of the iPhone used by one of the San Bernardino shooters. The successful hack allowed the U.S. government to shelve a contentious fight with Apple, which did not want to provide a software override to its mobile operating system.
The NSO Group is rare “because it’s one company that’s gotten caught,” said Eva Galperin, a global policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group in San Francisco. "There’s still a lot of light to be shed on this world,” she said.
Suspicious text
Its involvement, according to researchers who published findings on the spyware and notified Apple, was traced to the software's coding.
Ahmed Mansoor, a prominent human rights activist in the United Arab Emirates, told University of Toronto's Citizen Lab he was sent a suspicious SMS link. Working with mobile security firm Lookout, Citizen Lab said the link carried a powerful, rare form of spyware that could have cost as much as $1 million. If Mansoor had clicked on it, it would have given the sender the ability to control his phone's camera and microphone, track his movements and rifle through all his apps, files and contacts, they said.
NSO Group spokesman Zamir Dahbash, reached by email, would not confirm or deny involvement in the Mansoor spyware. He said: “NSO’s mission is to help make the world a safer place, by providing authorized governments with technology that helps them combat terror and crime."
Apple said it immediately fixed the vulnerability upon learning of it. On Thursday it advised customers to download the latest version of its iOS, version 9.3.5, for security protection.
Read full details at http://www.akelicious.com/2016/08/usa-to-continue-fight-with-iphone.html?m=1

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