Apple has notified several US State Department officials that their devices are infected with spyware developed by Israel’s NSO Group, Reuters and The Washington Post reported.
According to media reports, which cite their own sources, the infection affected iPhone 9 – 11 employees of the US Embassy stationed in Uganda. Below you can see what the warnings received by the victims looked like.
Reuters reports that all devices were registered with overseas numbers, but that they were clearly US government-owned, as all of the victims were using Apple IDs associated with email addresses ending in state.gov.
Representatives of the NSO Group assure that after the publication of the media, they immediately blocked the access of the offending client to their platform and are now studying the incident.
“In addition to an independent investigation, NSO will cooperate with any relevant government agency and provide full information that we have. Let us explain that the installation of our software by the customer takes place by phone numbers. As previously reported, NSO products are prohibited from working with US (+1) numbers. But after selling the software to a licensed customer, NSO has no way of knowing who the targets are, so we did not and could not have known about the case, ”company officials told Reuters.
Let me remind you that last month Apple filed a lawsuit against the NSO Group, which is behind the development of the famous spy platform Pegasus, capable of compromising even the most secure and modern iPhones. Apple said in a statement that “researchers and journalists have publicly documented the history of this spyware being used to target journalists, activists, dissidents, academics and government officials.”
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