techcrunch.com
Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
9:11 AM PDT · September 2, 2025
The Israeli spyware maker now faces the dilemma of whether to continue its relationship with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and help fuel its mass deportations program.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) signed a contract last year with Israeli spyware maker Paragon worth $2 million.
Shortly after, the Biden administration put the contract under review, issuing a “stop work order,” to determine whether the contract complied with an executive order on commercial spyware, which restricts U.S. government agencies from using spyware that could violate human rights or target Americans abroad.
Almost a year later, when it looked like the contract would just run out and never become active, ICE lifted the stop work order, according to public records.
“This contract is for a fully configured proprietary solution including license, hardware, warranty, maintenance, and training. This modification is to lift the stop work order,” read an update dated August 30 on the U.S. government’s Federal Procurement Data System, a database of government contracts.
Independent journalist Jack Poulson was the first to report the news in his newsletter.
Paragon has for years cultivated the image of being an “ethical” and responsible spyware maker, in contrast with controversial spyware purveyors such as Hacking Team, Intellexa, and NSO Group. On its official website, Paragon claims to provide its customers with “ethically based tools, teams, and insights.”
The spyware maker faces an ethical dilemma. Now that the contract with ICE’s Information Technology Division is active, it’s up to Paragon to decide whether it wants to continue its relationship with ICE, an agency that has dramatically ramped up mass deportations and expanded its surveillance powers since Donald Trump took over the White House.
Emily Horne, a spokesperson for Paragon, as well as executive chairman John Fleming, did not respond to a request for comment.
In an attempt to show its good faith, in February of this year, Fleming told TechCrunch that the company only sells to the U.S. government and other unspecified allied countries.
Paragon has already had to face a thorny ethical dilemma. In January, WhatsApp revealed that around 90 of its users, including journalists and human rights workers, had been targeted with Paragon’s spyware, called Graphite. In the following days and weeks, Italian journalist Francesco Cancellato and several local pro-immigration activists came forward saying they were among the victims.
In response to this scandal, Paragon cut ties with the Italian government, which had in the meantime launched an inquiry to determine what happened. Then, in June, digital rights research group Citizen Lab confirmed that two other journalists, an unnamed European and a colleague of Cancellato, had been hacked with Paragon’s spyware.
An Italian parliament committee concluded that the spying of the pro-immigration activists was legal, but it also claimed that there was no evidence that Italy’s intelligence agencies, former Paragon customers, had targeted Cancellato.
John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, who has investigated cases of spyware abuse for more than a decade, told TechCrunch that “these tools were designed for dictatorships, not democracies built on liberty and protection of individual rights.”
The researcher said that even spyware is “corrupting,” which is why “there’s a growing pile of spyware scandals in democracies, including with Paragon’s Graphite. Worse, Paragon is still shielding spyware abusers. Just look at the still-unexplained hacks of Italian journalists.”
techcrunch.com Zack Whittaker
11:15 AM PDT · August 29, 2025
A spyware vendor was behind a recent campaign that abused a vulnerability in WhatsApp to deliver an exploit capable of hacking into iPhones and Macs.
WhatsApp said on Friday that it fixed a security bug in its iOS and Mac apps that was being used to stealthily hack into the Apple devices of “specific targeted users.”
The Meta-owned messaging app giant said in its security advisory that it fixed the vulnerability, known officially as CVE-2025-55177, which was used alongside a separate flaw found in iOS and Macs, which Apple fixed last week and tracks as CVE-2025-43300.
Apple said at the time that the flaw was used in an “extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals.” Now we know that dozens of WhatsApp users were targeted with this pair of flaws.
Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, who heads Amnesty International’s Security Lab, described the attack in a post on X as an “advanced spyware campaign” that targeted users over the past 90 days, or since the end of May. Ó Cearbhaill described the pair of bugs as a “zero-click” attack, meaning it does not require any interaction from the victim, such as clicking a link, to compromise their device.
The two bugs chained together allow an attacker to deliver a malicious exploit through WhatsApp that’s capable of stealing data from the user’s Apple device.
Per Ó Cearbhaill, who posted a copy of the threat notification that WhatsApp sent to affected users, the attack was able to “compromise your device and the data it contains, including messages.”
It’s not immediately clear who, or which spyware vendor, is behind the attacks.
When reached by TechCrunch, Meta spokesperson Margarita Franklin confirmed the company detected and patched the flaw “a few weeks ago” and that the company sent “less than 200” notifications to affected WhatsApp users.
The spokesperson did not say, when asked, if WhatsApp has evidence to attribute the hacks to a specific attacker or surveillance vendor.
This is not the first time that WhatsApp users have been targeted by government spyware, a kind of malware capable of breaking into fully patched devices with vulnerabilities not known to the vendor, known as zero-day flaws.
In May, a U.S. court ordered spyware maker NSO Group to pay WhatsApp $167 million in damages for a 2019 hacking campaign that broke into the devices of more than 1,400 WhatsApp users with an exploit capable of planting NSO’s Pegasus spyware. WhatsApp brought the legal case against NSO, citing a breach of federal and state hacking laws, as well as its own terms of service.
Earlier this year, WhatsApp disrupted a spyware campaign that targeted around 90 users, including journalists and members of civil society across Italy. The Italian government denied its involvement in the spying campaign. Paragon, whose spyware was used in the campaign, later cut off Italy from its hacking tools for failing to investigate the abuse.
therecord.media -Germany’s highest court on Thursday ruled that law enforcement cannot use spyware to monitor personal devices in cases that carry less than a three year maximum sentence.
The court was responding to a lawsuit brought by the German digital freedoms organization Digitalcourage.
The plaintiffs argued that a 2017 rules change enabling law enforcement to use spyware to eavesdrop on encrypted chats and messaging platforms could unfairly expose communications belonging to people who are not criminal suspects.
The 2017 change to the German criminal procedure code was not precise enough about when spyware can be used, the court ruled, saying that snooping software is only appropriate in investigations of serious cases.
Such surveillance causes a “very severe interference” with fundamental rights, the court said in a press release.
Law enforcement use of spyware “enables the interception and analysis of all raw data exchanged and thus has an exceptional reach, particularly given the realities of modern information technology and its significance for communication relations,” the press release said.
computerweekly.com - The Austrian government is likely to face legal challenges after it succeeded on its fifth attempt to pass a law this month giving the country’s intelligence service legal powers to deploy spyware on phones and computers. Civil society groups are holding discussions with MPs on far-right Freedom Party (FPO) and the Greens, both of which voted against the new surveillance measures, regarding a legal challenge to Austria’s constitutional court.
Austria’s lower house passed the law on 9 July 2025, giving the Austrian intelligence service – the Directorate of State Protection and Intelligence (DSN) – the capability to deploy spyware, known as “a state trojan”, to monitor encrypted communications on services such as WhatsApp and Signal.
The three coalition governing parties, ÖVP, SPÖ and NEOS, agreed to changes to the State Protection and Intelligence Service Act (SNG), the Telecommunications Act 2021, the Security Police Act (SPG) and other laws to allow the state to spy on encrypted messages and gather other data stored on electronic devices.
The coalition government, headed by chancellor Christian Stocker, argued that Austria should have a legal framework to enable it to monitor encrypted messaging services in line with countries such as the UK and the US.
Austrian politicians pressed the case after a tip-off from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) warning of an impending attack at a Taylor Swift concert, part of the Eras Tour, in August 2024 led to the cancellation of three concerts in the country. US intelligence reportedly identified that one of the suspects pledged to ISIS-K on the Telegram messaging app.
Former chancellor Karl Nehammer also cited Austria’s biggest spying scandal, the Egisto Ott affair, as a reason for the DSN to be given more tools to act against foreign intelligence services, including the ability to intercept encrypted messaging services.
The new law has been criticised by civil society groups and some technology companies, which argue that the introduction of a “state trojan” will undermine internet security for Austrian citizens.
In July, 50 civil society groups from 16 countries wrote an open letter to MPs and the Austrian National Council, warning that the move to increase state surveillance would be a historic step backwards for IT security.
The civil society groups said the draft law was based on a “legal fiction” that would mean that, rather than protecting the population from cyber security risks, the state would instead promote and maintain security vulnerabilities, which will inevitably be discovered and exploited by hackers and hostile nation-states.
They point to the WannaCry ransomware attacks, which exploited a security vulnerability developed by the US National Security Agency (NSA) to infiltrate computer systems, causing severe disruption of hospitals, trains and mobile phone networks in 2017.
Thomas Lohninger, executive director of digital rights organisation Epicenter.Works, told Computer Weekly, that his organisation will “try everything” to challenge the new law in Austria’s constitutional court. This includes bringing a constitutional challenge from the opposition Green Party and far right FPÖ MPs before the law is enacted – a move that requires support from a third of MPs.
techcrunch.com - Google has suspended the account of phone surveillance operator Catwatchful, which was using the tech giant’s servers to host and operate the monitoring software.
Google’s move to shut down the spyware operation comes a month after TechCrunch alerted the technology giant the operator was hosting the operation on Firebase, one of Google’s developer platforms. Catwatchful relied on Firebase to host and store vast amounts of data stolen from thousands of phones compromised by its spyware.
“We’ve investigated these reported Firebase operations and suspended them for violating our terms of service,” Google spokesperson Ed Fernandez told TechCrunch in an email this week.
When asked by TechCrunch, Google would not say why it took a month to investigate and suspend the operation’s Firebase account. The company’s own terms of use broadly prohibit its customers from hosting malicious software or spyware operations on its platforms. As a for-profit company, Google has a commercial interest in retaining customers who pay for its services.
As of Friday, Catwatchful is no longer functioning nor does it appear to transmit or receive data, according to a network traffic analysis of the spyware carried out by TechCrunch.
Catwatchful was an Android-specific spyware that presented itself as a child-monitoring app “undetectable” to the user. Much like other phone spyware apps, Catwatchful required its customers to physically install it on a person’s phone, which usually requires prior knowledge of their passcode. These monitoring apps are often called “stalkerware” (or spouseware) for their propensity to be used for non-consensual surveillance of spouses and romantic partners, which is illegal.
Once installed, the app was designed to stay hidden from the victim’s home screen, and upload the victim’s private messages, photos, location data, and more to a web dashboard viewable by the person who planted the app.
TechCrunch first learned of Catwatchful in mid-June after security researcher Eric Daigle identified a security bug that was exposing the spyware operation’s back-end database.
The bug allowed unauthenticated access to the database, meaning no passwords or credentials were needed to see the data inside. The database contained more than 62,000 Catwatchful customer email addresses and plaintext passwords, as well as records on 26,000 victim devices compromised by the spyware.
The data also exposed the administrator behind the operation, a Uruguay-based developer called Omar Soca Charcov. TechCrunch contacted Charcov to ask if he was aware of the security lapse, or if he planned to notify affected individuals about the breach. Charcov did not respond.
With no clear indication that Charcov would disclose the breach, TechCrunch provided a copy of the Catwatchful database to data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned.
Catwatchful is the latest in a long list of surveillance operations that have experienced a data breach in recent years, in large part due to shoddy coding and poor cybersecurity practices. Catwatchful is by TechCrunch’s count the fifth spyware operation this year to have spilled users’ data, and the most recent entry in a list of more than two-dozen known spyware operations since 2017 that have exposed their banks of data.
As we noted in our previous story: Android users can identify if the Catwatchful spyware is installed, even if the app is hidden, by dialing 543210 into your Android phone app’s keypad and pressing the call button.
The spyware operation's exposed customer email addresses and passwords were shared with data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned.
A security vulnerability in a stealthy Android spyware operation called Catwatchful has exposed thousands of its customers, including its administrator.
The bug, which was discovered by security researcher Eric Daigle, spilled the spyware app’s full database of email addresses and plaintext passwords that Catwatchful customers use to access the data stolen from the phones of their victims.
Catwatchful is spyware masquerading as a child monitoring app that claims to be “invisible and cannot be detected,” all the while uploading the victim’s phone’s private contents to a dashboard viewable by the person who planted the app. The stolen data includes the victims’ photos, messages, and real-time location data. The app can also remotely tap into the live ambient audio from the phone’s microphone and access both front and rear phone cameras.
Spyware apps like Catwatchful are banned from the app stores and rely on being downloaded and planted by someone with physical access to a person’s phone. As such, these apps are commonly referred to as “stalkerware” (or spouseware) for their propensity to facilitate non-consensual surveillance of spouses and romantic partners, which is illegal.
Catwatchful is the latest example in a growing list of stalkerware operations that have been hacked, breached, or otherwise exposed the data they obtain, and is at least the fifth spyware operation this year to have experienced a data spill. The incident shows that consumer-grade spyware continues to proliferate, despite being prone to shoddy coding and security failings that expose both paying customers and unsuspecting victims to data breaches.
According to a copy of the database from early June, which TechCrunch has seen, Catwatchful had email addresses and passwords on more than 62,000 customers and the phone data from 26,000 victims’ devices.
Most of the compromised devices were located in Mexico, Colombia, India, Peru, Argentina, Ecuador, and Bolivia (in order of the number of victims). Some of the records date back to 2018, the data shows.
The Catwatchful database also revealed the identity of the spyware operation’s administrator, Omar Soca Charcov, a developer based in Uruguay. Charcov opened our emails, but did not respond to our requests for comment sent in both English and Spanish. TechCrunch asked if he was aware of the Catwatchful data breach, and if he plans to disclose the incident to its customers.
Without any clear indication that Charcov will disclose the incident, TechCrunch provided a copy of the Catwatchful database to data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned.
Following major public exposures by Insikt Group and others throughout the last two years, alongside US government sanctions targeting the Intellexa Consortium — the organizational structure behind the Predator mobile spyware — Insikt Group observed a significant decline in Predator-related activity. This apparent decline raised questions about whether the combination of US sanctions, public exposure, and broader international efforts to curb spyware proliferation, such as the UK and France-led Pall Mall process, had dealt a lasting blow to Intellexa’s operations. Yet, Predator activity has not stopped, and in recent months, Insikt Group has observed a resurgence of activity, reflecting the operators’ continued persistence. While much of the identified infrastructure is tied to known Predator operators in countries previously identified by Insikt Group, a new customer has also been identified in Mozambique — a country not previously publicly linked to the spyware. This aligns with the broader observation that Predator is highly active in Africa, with over half of its identified customers located on the continent. Additionally, Insikt Group has found a connection between high-tier Predator infrastructure and a Czech entity previously associated with the Intellexa Consortium.
On April 29, 2025, a select group of iOS users were notified by Apple that they were targeted with advanced spyware. Among the group were two journalists who consented to the technical analysis of their cases. In this report, we discuss key findings from our forensic analyses of their devices.
Researchers revealed on Thursday that two European journalists had their iPhones hacked with spyware made by Paragon. Apple says it has fixed the bug that was used to hack their phones.
The Citizen Lab wrote in its report, shared with TechCrunch ahead of its publication, that Apple had told its researchers that the flaw exploited in the attacks had been “mitigated in iOS 18.3.1,” a software update for iPhones released on February 10.
Until this week, the advisory of that security update mentioned only one unrelated flaw, which allowed attackers to disable an iPhone security mechanism that makes it harder to unlock phones.
On Thursday, however, Apple updated its February 10 advisory to include details about a new flaw, which was also fixed at the time but not publicized.
“A logic issue existed when processing a maliciously crafted photo or video shared via an iCloud Link. Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals,” reads the now-updated advisory.
In the final version of its report published Thursday, The Citizen Lab confirmed this is the flaw used against Italian journalist Ciro Pellegrino and an unnamed “prominent” European journalist
It’s unclear why Apple did not disclose the existence of this patched flaw until four months after the release of the iOS update, and an Apple spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment seeking clarity.
The Paragon spyware scandal began in January, when WhatsApp notified around 90 of its users, including journalists and human rights activists, that they had been targeted with spyware made by Paragon, dubbed Graphite.
Then, at the end of April, several iPhone users received a notification from Apple alerting them that they had been the targets of mercenary spyware. The alert did not mention the spyware company behind the hacking campaign.
On Thursday, The Citizen Lab published its findings confirming that two journalists who had received that Apple notification were hacked with Paragon’s spyware.
It’s unclear if all the Apple users who received the notification were also targeted with Graphite. The Apple alert said that “today’s notification is being sent to affected users in 100 countries.”
Throughout late 2024 and early 2025, iVerify detected anomalous activity on iPhones belonging to individuals affiliated with political campaigns, media organizations, A.I. companies and governments operating in the United States and European Union.
Specifically, we detected exceedingly rare crashes typically associated with sophisticated zero-click attacks via iMessage – an exploitation technique previously unobserved in any systematic way in the United States. Subsequent forensic examination of several of these devices ultimately revealed a previously unknown vulnerability in the “imagent” process which, owing to its relative position in the operating system and functionality, would provide attackers a primitive for further exploitation. This vulnerability was patched by Apple in iOS 18.3. We’ve dubbed this vulnerability NICKNAME.
In the course of our investigation, we discovered evidence suggesting – but not definitively proving – this vulnerability was exploited in targeted attacks as recently as March of this year. Specifically, we learned that Apple sent Threat Notifications to at least one device belonging to a senior government official in the EU on which we saw the highly anomalous crashes. Likewise, one device demonstrated behavior frequently associated with successful exploitation, specifically the creation and deletion of iMessage attachments in bulk within a matter of seconds on several occasions after an anomalous crash. We only observed these crashes on devices belonging to extremely high value targets. And these crashes constituted only .0001% of the crash log telemetry taken from a sample of 50,000 iPhones.
Spyware maker NSO Group will have to pay more than $167 million in damages to WhatsApp for a 2019 hacking campaign against more than 1,400 users.
On Tuesday, after a five-year legal battle, a jury ruled that NSO Group must pay $167,254,000 in punitive damages and around $444,719 in compensatory damages.
This is a huge legal win for WhatsApp, which had asked for more than $400,000 in compensatory damages, based on the time its employees had to dedicate to remediate the attacks, investigate them, and push fixes to patch the vulnerability abused by NSO Group, as well as unspecified punitive damages.
WhatsApp’s spokesperson Zade Alsawah said in a statement that “our court case has made history as the first victory against illegal spyware that threatens the safety and privacy of everyone.”
Alsawah said the ruling “is an important step forward for privacy and security as the first victory against the development and use of illegal spyware that threatens the safety and privacy of everyone. Today, the jury’s decision to force NSO, a notorious foreign spyware merchant, to pay damages is a critical deterrent to this malicious industry against their illegal acts aimed at American companies and the privacy and security of the people we serve.”
NSO Group’s spokesperson Gil Lainer left the door open for an appeal.
“We will carefully examine the verdict’s details and pursue appropriate legal remedies, including further proceedings and an appeal,” Lainer said in a statement.
In March 2025, our team found a suspicious mach-O file named wsus. Read the full analysis on its likely origins, target users, and observed functionality.
Two spyware variants – Moonshine and BadBazaar – are being used to target the mobile devices of persons of interest to Chinese intelligence, including individuals in the Taiwanese, Tibetan and Uyghur communities.
In our first investigation into Israel-based spyware company, Paragon Solutions, we begin to untangle multiple threads connected to the proliferation of Paragon's mercenary spyware operations across the globe. This report includes an infrastructure analysis of Paragon’s spyware product, called Graphite; a forensic analysis of infected devices belonging to members of civil society; and a closer look at the use of Paragon spyware in both Canada and Italy.
Cybersecurity firm Lookout found several samples of a North Korean spyware it calls KoSpy.
Lookout researchers have discovered a novel Android surveillance tool dubber KoSpy. It is attributed to APT 37 aka ScarCruft
Amnesty International’s Security Lab uncovers sophisticated Cellebrite zero-day exploit, impacting billions of Android devices.
Amnesty International said that Google fixed previously unknown flaws in Android that allowed authorities to unlock phones using forensic tools. On
Security researchers found evidence that Cellebrite was used by Serbian police to hack into the cellphones of a local journalist and an activist.
Italian company SIO, which sells to government customers, is behind an Android spyware campaign called Spyrtacus that spoofed popular apps like WhatsApp, per security researchers.
