NSO Group must pay more than $167 million in damages to WhatsApp for spyware campaign

The NSO spyware group will have to pay more than 167 million dollars as compensation to WhatsApp for the 2019 penetration campaign against more than 1,400 users.

On Tuesday, after a five -year legal battle, a jury ruled that the NSO group must pay 167,256,000 dollars as punitive compensation and about $ 444,719 of compensatory damage.

This is a major legal victory for WhatsApp, which requested more than $ 400,000 of compensatory damage, based on the time that its employees had to devote them to treat attacks and investigate them and pay repairs to exploration of the weakness that was assaulted by NSO Group, as well as unlimited punitive damage.

WhatsApp did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

NSO Group Gil Lainer spokesman left the door open to a call

“We will carefully study the ruling details and follow the appropriate legal treatments, including additional procedures and appeal,” Lynar said in a statement.

The trial, as well as the entire case, paid a series of disclosure, such as the site of the 2019 spyware campaign, as well as the names of some NSO Group customers.

The judgment represents the end – awaiting a possible appeal – for a legal battle that started more than five years ago, when WhatsApp filed a lawsuit against the spyware maker. The company -owned company accused the NSO group of accessing WhatsApp servers and exploiting the vote call in the chat application to target about 1,400 people, including dissidents, human rights activists and journalists.

CathCart, head of WhatsApp, explained that the logic of the lawsuit in a café in the Washington Post at the time, saying that “this should be an invitation to wake up to technology, governments and all Internet users. Tools that allow monitoring in our private lives.

Last December, WhatsApp won. Judge Felis Hamilton, who headed the case, spent that the NSO group was responsible for violating federal piracy and California in the 2019 spyware campaign against the 1400 WhatsApp users.

Cathcart celebrated by December in his saying in the X publication that it is a “great victory”, and that “monitoring companies should be about tolerance with illegal espionage.”

At this stage, the case has moved to the jury’s experience to determine the damage that owes the WhatsApp Spy Program Company, which has now concluded.