The spyware firm, the NSO Group, tied to an iPhone hack that prompted an emergency patch this week by Apple keeps a very low profile. But NSO has strong ties here as well as in Israel, where it's staffed by specialists from Israel's military cyber division. One of the owners of NSO is a company based in San Francisco. NSO keeps a very low profile; it doesn't have a web page. But it describes itself as "a leader in the field of Cyber warfare," according to an apparent company brochure posted online by Privacy International. The tech company's focus on cyber warfare reflects the growing boom in cybersecurity firms that operate in a nebulous area: creating software and processes that break into encrypted devices for government entities.
The company uses "a powerful and unique monitoring tool, called Pegasus, which allows remote and stealth monitoring and full data extraction from remote target devices via untraceable commands," says the brochure. While these hacks can be legal under the laws of the country buying the product, they raise severe privacy worries from consumer groups. They also highlight concerns that increasingly rigorous encryption from Apple and other consumer tech companies is vulnerable to attacks funded by deep-pocked entities.
Credits:
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2016/08/26/shadowy-israeli-firm-behind-apple-hack-tool/89408936/
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