Israel-located NSO Group may no longer be a malware option for the US and other discerning governments around the world, thanks to blacklists, lawsuits, and its disturbing willingness to sell to some of the most abhorrent governments of earth. But the market for powerful phone exploits isn’t dying up. Governments still want powerful surveillance tech, even if it means buying from the same market NSO Group almost ruined.
Paragon — formed by a former Israeli intelligence officer, and which currently has ex-Israel prime minister Ehud Barak on its board — is the new option, one even US agencies are willing to approach. Not that Paragon is necessarily that much more ethical than NSO. But, for now, its malware has only been traced to countries that most people wouldn’t consider to be habitual human rights abusers. This is from Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai’s report for TechCrunch, which sums up the discoveries made by Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which has led the world in exposures of abusive deployments of NSO Group spyware.
Källa: Israeli Malware Maker Linked To Six Government Purchasers, Abusive Deployments
