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.
A Chinese startup, Sand AI, appears to be blocking certain politically sensitive images from its online video generation tool.
A China-based startup, Sand AI, has released an openly licensed, video-generating AI model that’s garnered praise from entrepreneurs like the founding director of Microsoft Research Asia, Kai-Fu Lee. But Sand AI appears to be censoring the hosted version of its model to block images that might raise the ire of Chinese regulators from the hosted version of the model, according to TechCrunch’s testing.
Earlier this week, Sand AI announced Magi-1, a model that generates videos by “autoregressively” predicting sequences of frames. The company claims the model can generate high-quality, controllable footage that captures physics more accurately than rival open models.
The crosswalk buttons, which include audio alerts, were hacked over the weekend.
"Don't do crime," the ransomware gang's dark web leak site reads.
Are you willing to hack and take control of Chinese websites for a random person for up to $100,000 a month?
Someone is making precisely that tantalizing, bizarre, and clearly sketchy job offer. The person is using what looks like a series of fake accounts with avatars displaying photos of attractive women and sliding into the direct messages of several cybersecurity professionals and researchers on X in the last couple of weeks.
Cybersecurity firm Lookout found several samples of a North Korean spyware it calls KoSpy.
Affected staff say more than 100 employees working to protect U.S. government networks were ‘axed’ with no prior warning
Another little-known phone monitoring outfit has quietly amassed half a million customers, whose email addresses are now in Have I Been Pwned.
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.
North Korea is behind the massive crypto hack, according to several blockchain monitoring firms and a well-known researcher
A bug in the Android and iPhone monitoring operations allows anyone to access private data exfiltrated from a victim's device.
The prolific Medusa ransomware group claims to have stolen troves of data from HCRG, including patients’ sensitive health data
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.
Following allegations of potential abuse, Paragon Solutions has cut off Italy from its spyware systems.
The Taiwanese hardware maker says it has no plans patch the flaws impacting legacy router models
India's Tata Technologies has disclosed a ransomware attack affecting its IT assets.
What do you do if a web address you printed on a physical flyer contains a typo, and you send that flyer to more than 100,000 households? Well, if you're
Nominet, the U.K. domain registry that maintains .co.uk domains, has experienced a cybersecurity incident that it confirmed is linked to the recent
ICAO says the incident was allegedly linked to a hacker 'known for targeting international organizations'
