WhatsApp Reveals NSO Group’s Deep Involvement in Hacking 1,400 Users Worldwide

NSO Group would have set up "malicious code to cause a mobile user’s device to connect to a remote server, not associated with WhatsApp," testifies Claudiu Gheorghe, WhatsApp’s software engineering manager.

New elements appeared on April 23. According to WhatsApp experts, NSO Group used a network of computers to monitor and update Pegasus, after its installation on users’ devices, mainly human rights lawyers, journalists, senior officials, but also political dissidents, reports TelQuel.

Morocco is one of the 45 user countries of Pegasus. Bill Marczak, a Citizen Lab researcher, will confide that the kingdom is also one of the six countries where "significant Pegasus activities have been carried out and have already been associated with the abusive use of spyware to target civil society". The NSO group would have deployed Pegasus in Morocco through an operator codenamed "Atlas", and its spread would have been possible only through the operators Maroc Telecom and Orange.

Subsequently, there was an attack launched from Saudi Arabia by an operator named "Kingdom", and the software would also have infected Moroccan phones. In October 2019, academic Maati Monjib and Abdessadak El Bouchattaoui, a human rights lawyer who became famous thanks to the Hirak of Rif trial, were the subject of hacking and surveillance by Pegasus, according to Amnesty International.