What You Don’t Know About Israel’s Latest Spyware Attack 🧵
In Dec 2024, nearly 100 journalists and civil society members, including Palestinian activists, were hacked using zero-click spyware.
Targets were added to WhatsApp group chats without their permission and sent PDFs which immediately infected their phones, granting total access to the spyware operator.
This included data collection from:
· Messages on encrypted applications
· Precise GPS co-ordinates
· Emails
· Media files and documents
· Recording voice calls
· Camera and Microphone control
Graphite, the spyware used in the attack is owned by Paragon, an Israeli company.
It was founded by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and is run by ex-IOF intelligence 8200 Unit officers and ex-NSO Group developers.
Paragon has 35 government customers including US Homeland Security and Israeli law enforcement, military and intelligence agencies.
NSO Group is a blacklisted company controlled by the Israeli Ministry of Defence.
NSO developed Pegasus, a spyware that infected and hacked activists, journalists, human rights campaigners and government officials in 2019 using WhatsApp links and phone calls.
In December 2024, a US judge ruled that NSO Group violated US state and federal hacking laws after Meta filed a lawsuit.
Graphite and Pegasus’ capabilities are almost identical.
Meta sent a cease-and-desist letter to Paragon after the latest cyber-attack.
Paragon responded that they will fight Meta in court.
Eli Pinko, in defence of Israeli spyware licence exports stated: “it’s either the civil rights in some country or Israel’s right to exist”
Israel’s Supreme Court President Esther Hayut justified: “our economy, as it happens, rests not a little on that [NSO licence] export.
Israel’s military and surveillance technologies are tested on Palestinians before being exported globally.
Palestinian Al-Jazeera journalist Anas al-Sharif recounts receiving phone calls and WhatsApp messages moments before the hospital he was in was targeted in an Israeli airstrike.
Al-Sharif’s home was later targeted twice, killing his elderly father and many of his relatives.
Paragon and NSO are dangerous tools of a rogue apartheid state committing genocide and war crimes.
These spyware companies violate human rights and privacy laws globally with impunity, ending and upending innocent people’s lives for speaking truth to power.
And they have access to YOUR devices.
The time to act is NOW
Join the global effort to stop cyber espionage and surveillance capitalism before it is too late…
See
waronwant.org/sites/default/…
Sources:
Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation around the World, 2023.
lookout.com/blog/protect-a…
theguardian.com/technology/202…
forbes.com/sites/thomasbr…
theguardian.com/news/series/pe…
surveillancewatch.io
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