Smart phones of the 9th UN employees are hacked

Phones of at least nine employees of the US State Department have become cyberattacks through a sophisticated surveillance program produced by Israel-based NSO company, according to four people who have knowledge of the issue.

Interventions that took place in recent months by unknown hackers had targeted American officials serving in Uganda, as well as those dealing with issues related to this East African country, said two sources quoted by Reuters news agency, which reported the first on the news.

The attack is the largest known interventions into the means of communication American officials access through NSO company technology.

Reuters could not identify the authors of the latest cyber attacks.

The NSO group said in a statement Thursday that there was no indication that technology produced by this company had been used, and said it would investigate based on the Reuters agency's announcement.

If the investigation shows that these actions have indeed been performed with NSO equipment, clients will be removed permanently the right to use them and take legal action“, said an NSO spokesman, who added that the group would co-operate with any relevant government authority and will publish the full information it will receive”.

The NSO has long said that it sells its products only to clients in the area of law enforcement and intelligence, helping them monitor security threats and that it is not directly involved in surveillance operations.

Officials at the Uganda Embassy in Washington made no comments. An Apple company spokesman refused to comment.

A State Department spokesman declined to comment on interventions, but cited the latest trade department decision to include the Israeli company on an entity list, with which American companies find it difficult to co-operate in doing business.

The NSO group and another firm producing surveillance devices “included in the entity list based on the reasoning that they have produced and made available surveillance equipment for foreign governments that have used them to target government officials, journalists, businessmen, activists, academics and embassy employees”, the Department of Commerce said in a statement last month.

Ease in Authentication

The NSO program is able not only to record encrypted messages, photos and other sensitive information from phones that have been intervened, but also to turn them into registration equipment to monitor the environment, based on product manuals surveyed by the Reuters agency.

The Apple Company's announcement of the affected users did not mention the company that has developed software.

The persons targeted reportedly by Apple included American citizens and were easily identified as employees of the US government, because they had used the State Department email addresses with their Apple phone IDs, two of the people said.

Their phones and other affected persons reported by Apple and who were in different countries were infected by a defect Apple had not fixed by September, sources said.

At least as of February, this program bug had allowed several NSO clients to take over and control iPhone phones simply by sending out invisible but infected requests through text-mails to equipment, said researchers who have analysed the spying campaign.

The victims did not need to see the request or to take action in order to gain success, writes the barrel. Once the drilling was done, the NSO's software surveillance version, known as Pegasus, could be installed.

The Apple Company's announcement that it would inform the affected came last week on the same day she indicted the NSO group, accusing him of helping many clients access the company's equipment software, iOS.

In a public response, The NSO has said its technology helps curb terrorism and that it has installed control tools to curb surveillance of innocent targets.

For example, The NSO says its intervention system cannot function on phones with American numbers starting with +1 prefixing.

But in Uganda's case, State Department employees targeted iPhones registered with foreign phone numbers said two of the sources.

A senior official of President Beden's administration, which was not identified, said the threat to American personnel abroad was one of the reasons the administration was taking action against companies like the NSO and was taking on a global or scale discussion of surveillance limit.

The official added that the administration has noted <x0 systemic expressions” in many countries involving NSO software Pegasus.

Historically, in the past, some of the company's most popular clients included Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico.

Israeli Defence Ministry is one that approves export licenses for company The NSO, which has close ties to Israel's defence and intelligence community, to sell its technology internationally.

In a statement, the Israeli embassy in Washington said targeting American officials was a serious violation of its rules.

Cyber products such as this one being mentioned are supervised and licensed to export to other countries only for purposes related to counter-terrorism and serious crimes“, an embassy spokesman said.

The license recommendations are very clear, and if these claims are true, it is a serious violation of these “provisions, he said.