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Status: 07/19/2021 12:56 p.m.
The Israeli NSO Group is considered the market leader in surveillance software. It sells powerful espionage tools to security agencies and intelligence agencies around the world. The success story of a controversial company.
By Christian Baars, Florian Flade and Georg Mascolo,
NDR / WDR
It is said to have been a secret service from Europe who gave him the business idea. This is what Shalev Hulio, founder of the Israeli tech company NSO Group Technologies, told the journalist Ronen Bergman two years ago.
Hulio used to have a small company. She helped customers solve problems on their smartphones. And not via complicated, time-consuming instructions via the hotline. The customers were simply sent a link, clicked on it and granted the helpful technician access to the cell phone. Done – remote maintenance, so to speak.
The European intelligence agents were quite taken with it, said the Israeli. They would have asked him why he didn’t also use the technology to secretly spy on smartphones. “We are going blind”, they are supposed to have said. “Help us!”
A secret industry
That was the hour of birth of NSO, at least that is the version of the company boss. The 40-year-old Shalev Hulio, born in Haifa, descendant of Romanian Holocaust survivors, founded the company in 2010 together with his partners Niv Carmi and Omri Lavie. The company name stands for the first letters of the first names of the founding trio. Today, the company is one of the market leaders in surveillance technology, a secret industry that largely shies away from the public.
According to its own information, NSO has around 60 customers in 40 countries. The company is now valued at more than one billion euros. The demand for the products from the portfolio is great. NSO enables police authorities, armies and secret services worldwide to monitor cell phones – and to do so in full. Even encrypted communication via chat programs such as WhatsApp or Signal can be effortlessly spied on with the company’s inventions.
Spy in your pocket
The most successful and at the same time most controversial product from NSO is called “Pegasus”. It is powerful spy software that is secretly installed on a smartphone. It can be used to monitor calls, e-mails, SMS and even encrypted chats. The Trojan can also search through photos and videos and read passwords. “Pegasus” is even able to switch on the microphone and camera of the device inconspicuously. The NSO software turns a cell phone into a spy in your pocket without the victim noticing anything.
According to NSO, it only sells its products to audited government agencies in order to monitor criminals, terrorists or extremists, and only with the prior approval of the Israeli export control officers. In addition, you do not do business with regimes known for violating human rights, persecuting journalists or opposition activists. According to its own information, the company even maintains a kind of “black list” of more than 20 countries to which no software is sold. Russia, China, Iran, Cuba and North Korea should be among them.
Hunted criminals
NSO also claims that it will not “hesitate” to terminate business relationships and shut down customer systems if it is confirmed that the software has been “misused”. This has already happened in the past. “In truth,” the technology is “used daily to break up pedophilia, sex and drug trafficking rings, to locate missing and kidnapped children,” the company says.
In fact, the “Pegasus” Trojan is said to have been used in the past to successfully hunt down serious criminals. One of the criminals who are said to have been located using NSO technology is Joaquin Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, better known as “El Chapo”, the Mexican drug lord and head of the dreaded Sinaloa cartel.
“Pegasus Project”
The focus of the research is the software “Pegasus”, which was developed by the Israeli company NSO. According to its own information, it only makes the program available to government agencies for the prosecution of criminals or terrorists.
As part of the “Pegasus Project”, journalists analyzed a list of more than 50,000 telephone numbers to which the Parisian non-profit organization Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International had access. The numbers are destinations that customers of the company have entered as possible destinations for monitoring activities.
The weekly newspaper “Die Zeit”, the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, were involved in the research in Germany. NDR and WDR. Worldwide media such as the “Washington Post” in the USA, the British “Guardian” and “Le Monde” in France were involved. The collaboration was coordinated by Forbidden Stories. Amnesty International’s Security Lab provided technical support and cell phone forensic analysis.
More than 800 employees
In the initial phase, NSO resided in the Israeli village of Moshav Bnei Zion north of Tel Aviv and had only a few employees. The head office is now in Herzlia, there has been an office in Cyprus and another in Bulgaria. NSO is currently said to have more than 800 employees. Some are said to have learned their keyboard skills in the cyber units of the Israeli army, including the legendary unit 8200, which is considered to be one of the most capable hacking troops in the world.
Company boss Shalev Hulio is not a hacker, however. According to his own statements, he first studied art and theater at a school in Haifa, then he went to the military and was deployed in the home front command, including in the West Bank. After the army he tried his luck as a salesman in the USA, then came back to Israel, studied law in Herzliya and founded software companies, including those that specialize in smartphone support – and finally NSO.
Facebook sued NSO
The Trojan forge was long unknown to the general public. In recent years, however, it has become one of the most sought-after manufacturers of spy software – and one of the most controversial. There were early indications that NSO products are not only used to hunt down terrorists and other criminals, but are also used by authoritarian regimes to spy on political opponents or critical journalists.
For example, IT experts found evidence of an infection with the “Pegasus” software on the cell phone of the human rights activist Ahmad Mansur, who is critical of the government, from the United Arab Emirates.
In addition, there was a sensational lawsuit in the USA in 2019. The Facebook subsidiary WhatsApp sued NSO in a Californian court because the Israeli company allegedly exploited a vulnerability in WhatsApp’s software to infect smartphones worldwide with a Trojan. According to Facebook, around 1400 devices in at least 20 countries are said to have been attacked in this way. Politicians, journalists, lawyers and the military were also affected.
To this day, NSO denies being involved in the selection of its customers’ targets or even knowing who was attacked with “Pegasus”. However, as company boss Hulio assured in the past, the products have demonstrably prevented many terrorist attacks. You are on a “life-saving mission”.