Criticism of ONS is likely part of “orchestrated effort to harm Israel”

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(Aug 10, 2021 / JNS) Allegations that spyware developed by Israeli cyber firm NSO Group has been widely misused by its government clients has created a headache not only for the company, but also for the cyber -Israeli industry and the Ministry of Defense. However, the scandal leaves some skeptical.

Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based nonprofit journalism organization, revealed the story in mid-July, accusing NSO spyware was not being used for its intended purpose to track down criminals and terrorists, but were instead turned against politicians, journalists and critics of repressive regimes.

Spyware, named Pegasus, hacks smartphones undetected and turns them into surveillance devices. Spyware can remotely access emails, passwords, contact lists, even the camera, microphone and phone tracking system, according to NSO marketing materials.

My take is that what is happening with the NSO issue is an orchestrated effort to harm Israel by defaming one of its cyber companies. It has nothing to do with the NSO, Israel Defense Forces Col. Gabi Siboni, a researcher at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security with expertise in cybersecurity, military strategy, told JNS. and technology.

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There are many non-Israeli companies that provide similar services in France, the United States and the United Kingdom. They were not targeted in this way, he noted.

In Italy, there is Memento Labs and in Spain, Mollitiam. The UAE’s DarkMatter group claims to be purely defensive, although whistleblowers have said it is also engaged in offensive capabilities.

Siboni sees NSO’s story as a flank against the Israeli cyber industry as a whole, a mainstay of the country’s economy.

If anyone is trying to take cyber Israeli down a notch, they’ve chosen to hit Israel at their strongest point. The Israeli cyber industry is in tears. It raised $ 3.36 billion in the first half of 2021, an amount that broke the fundraising record of 2020 together, according to figures provided to JNS by Israel’s National Cyber ​​Security Directorate. Over a third of the world’s cyber unicorns are Israeli (unicorns are private companies worth over $ 1 billion).

Siboni says the motives behind the story are political. We are facing BDS attempts, and we must face them. It’s all part of the same campaign, and we need to develop a strategy.

The Defense Ministry has promised to get to the bottom of it

What will probably arouse suspicion for some is the identity of one of the key players in Amnesty International, whose security lab provided cell phone scans for Forbidden Stories. The lab said it confirmed traces of NSO Groups spyware Pegasus on 37 phones belonging to journalists, human rights activists and others. The results were peer reviewed and confirmed by a Canadian organization called Citizen Lab, Forbidden Stories reported. These 37 phones are just a drop of water on a list of 50,000 numbers that, according to Forbidden Stories, have been hacked or targeted for hacking by the NSO software.

Neither Forbidden Stories nor Amnesty will reveal how the list was obtained; JNS contacted the two, but they did not respond.

Although Forbidden Stories is relatively unknown, Amnesty International’s motives are certainly questionable. Besides his one-sided take on the Arab-Israeli conflict, as detailed by groups such as NGO Monitor, in 2019 he attempted to sue Israel’s Defense Ministry in the Tel Aviv District Court to force it to withdraw the NSO group from its export licenses. Amnesty claimed that ONS’s Pegasus software was used against human rights activists, including an Amnesty employee. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2020 due to a lack of evidence.

Siboni said this does not conclusively prove that Amnesty is the one behind the story. I’m sure a reporter got this information and believed he got it from a reliable source, he said.

Eyal Zisser, vice-rector of Tel Aviv University and professor of Middle Eastern studies, stressed that the Israelis did not support the idea of ​​spying on journalists or human rights activists.

Israel must investigate the matter and get to the bottom of it. If it turns out that ONS clients have been spying on journalists and activists, then they should be punished. If they did so with the knowledge of the ONS, the company should also be punished. Israel’s defense ministry has promised to get to the bottom of it, he told JNS.

However, he too tends to agree that something is missing from the story and also believes that the criticism of NSO is politically motivated. I noticed that Al Jazeera was paying a lot of attention to it, he said of the Qatar-based outlet whose hostility towards Israel is well documented. Zisser would not venture to guess the origins of the story. I am on [the Ministry of Defense] knows exactly who is behind it.

There are countries that would be very happy to see Israel attacked rather than themselves, he said, adding that NSO Group has become a convenient scapegoat, distracting not just from misbehaving state actors. , but also social media companies like WhatsApp and Facebook, which have come under scrutiny for the collection of personal data.

We don’t have a target list

Assaf Harduf, a lecturer at Israel’s Zefat Academic College in northern Israel, specializing in cybercrime, told JNS that many are indeed starting to worry about social media companies, but the masses are still providing Unlimited data companies on the go to get more likes online. People lose a lot of privacy for social acceptance.

NSO Group, for its part, has vehemently denied accusations that its customers have abused its product. Company co-founder and CEO Shalev Hulio said that a 50,000 number list is impossible because the company only has 45 clients and each client is limited to tracking 100 targets each year.

Since we created the company, over the years we have not had 50,000 targets, he told the Hebrew daily Israel Hayom on July 23. NSO was founded in 2010.

Hulio said he initially thought it was all a joke. When, at the end of June, he was warned by someone outside the company that the company’s servers in Cyprus had been breached and his list of targets had been leaked, he had a moment of anxiety but Then realized that we don’t have any servers in Cyprus, and also, we don’t have a target list.

Shalev said the client chooses who to track with the spyware, and NSO does not operate it for the client once it is installed. However, NSO reserves the right to disconnect a customer from the network if the product is misused, which the company has done in five cases. NSO refused to sell its services to 90 countries and all of its activities were carried out under the supervision of the Ministry of Defense. Two-thirds of NSO clients are in Europe, Shalev said.

On June 30, NSO released its very first Transparency and Accountability Report, which offered a unique overview of the limitations and restrictions of its Pegasus software.

Although initially sensitive to the media, NSO Group abruptly stopped cooperating on July 21, clearly concluding that those publishing the story were not acting in good faith. The company posted a statement on its website titled Enough is Enough.

In light of the recent planned and well-orchestrated media campaign by Forbidden Stories and pushed by special interest groups, and due to total disregard for the facts, NSO announces that it will no longer respond to media inquiries on this matter. , and he will not play with the vicious and slanderous campaign, the statement said.

Israel has a very strict export law

Countries accused of abusing the software have not only denied the allegations, but have also denied being customers of NSO. Morocco categorically rejected the claim that its intelligence services had targeted 10,000 numbers on the list and said it had never acquired the Pegasus software.

Moroccan Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita said on July 22 that the story was a bluff. It is not journalism. This is large-scale sabotage done from scratch and without any proof. Other countries, such as India, Hungary and Rwanda, have also denied using the software.

The denials did not derail the story, in part thanks to Forbidden Stories’ partnership with 17 media outlets, including The Washington Post, Le Monde and The Guardian, ensuring wide coverage in many countries.

A wave of political backlash ensued. Four members of the US Democratic Congress issued a letter on July 26 calling on the government to consider sanctioning the NSO group. In Europe, the head of the European Commission said that if the hacking was true, it was totally unacceptable.

Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz was forced to assure his French counterpart that French President Emmanuel Macron’s phone had not been hacked (his number, as well as those of 13 other heads of state were listed on the list). Israel is investigating the matter with the utmost seriousness, Gantz said at his July 28 meeting in Paris with French Armed Forces Minister Florence Parly. The French government has announced that it has opened investigations into the allegations.

Israel’s Defense Ministry has said that Israel regulates the export of cybernetic products and only approves their use for government entities to prevent and investigate crime and the fight against terrorism.

Israel has a very strict export law. There is a very serious committee within the Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Economy, they all combine to review any export request. They refuse or give a waiver of the export. First, NSO would never export without this consent, Siboni said.

Regardless of its validity, the story forced the Israeli cyber industry to heed it. The Marker, a Hebrew-language business daily, reports that on August 1, several Israeli cyber companies specializing in offensive cyber capabilities gathered for an emergency meeting in Tel Aviv to develop a unified approach and discuss possible regulatory fallout from charges of mass espionage. .

Cyber ​​surveillance is a technology that can do a lot of good when shot against criminals and terrorists, but in the wrong hands it can invade privacy and suppress freedom, Zisser said. It is in this sense a problematic technology and the elaboration of the rules of its control is the challenge.

Harduf added that the technology is known to be neither good nor bad; it is only a tool. Like guns and knives, cars and electricity, cyber technology can be used to help or harm others. We need to think about how to encourage positive uses and eliminate negative uses.

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