NSO Group

they considered a threat.

For example, we discovered that a UAE-based human rights defender named Ahmad Mansour had his phone targeted with SMS messages that contained links to NSO Group's Pegasus spyware.

When I was researching this part of the story, I spoke to Ron Debert, and he's a researcher at an organization called Citizen Labs in Toronto, Canada.

And Ron and his colleagues at Citizen Labs were part of the team who first undertook kind of technical analysis on Pegasus to determine what it is as a cyber

And I thought, let's do a focal point on that with that larger point of the conversation, because I frankly think it's like one of the most important when it comes to the tech side of this.

So I don't know if you've seen this as well, but are you familiar with the general spyware conversation, I imagine, right? Like the idea of how much Israeli spyware and NSO Group and Pegasus and all that?

Yeah.

I just wonder if we even, if, if 1977 project Oracle wasn't just like the beginning of it, you know, in, in a sense that because you've got a guy who is an ardent Zionist, who's running a CIA secure, you know, information front group or what do they call it? They don't know whether Oracle runs the CIA or CIA runs Oracle or what sort of, but it's been intertwined in it.

So it says yesterday...

I received a security notification from Apple warning me that my iPhone, and now be clear, that was Max's framing.

It could just be some random thing, but that his iPhone had been targeted by a sophisticated mercenary spyware attack involving technology of the kind developed by companies such as NSO Group and Pegasus.

I mean, it does say that.

And you know better, right? And it keeps happening.

where you get individuals like this or companies like this, and, you know, NSO, Pegasus.

Like, this is a continual thing.

Virnet becomes Cognite.

So, I mean, I hope we can establish that that's an Israeli company.

It's based in Israel.

U.S. tech company, Virent, reportedly in talks to buy Israeli cyber surveillance firm NSO.

Hold on a minute.

And it's very, very interesting.

The Israeli US cybersecurity company [laughs] Verint Systems is reportedly negotiating to buy NSO Group.

By the way, NSO Group, that you should know, is a very, very, very criminal org- [laughs] I mean, I, I don't even wanna show these two articles yet.

Hold on.

I wanted to...

Ugh.

I love the mainstream media.

NSO Group, Israeli spyware company added to US trade blacklist.

guess

what's the right word for it you know i mean it's obviously sort of an infiltration i always try to be careful with the terms that may scare certain people away that really are interested but may feel that we're seeing things a certain way even though we shouldn't the point is it's clearly a kind of global spyware infiltration but what's interesting as we'll show today in one of the articles is that this is something that at one point very recently pegasus nso group the company and the technology being framed as you know what it is a criminal act a criminal organization you know an illegal backdoor quiet you know something that's seen by the government says what we're not supposed to be like and that's what it was very recently until it just kind of got folded into the normal mainstream conversation and we saw that and it's not just trump or ice or any of that but that's where it became very seen in this administration but we've seen global change over the last decade or plus where Trump, and I'll show you the articles we get into it yet again today, welcoming back the NSO group into the US government or the idea of ICE and giving them contracts, normalizing what these things are as somehow special, important tools for the good guys to do the wrong things to fight the bad guys who also do those same wrong things.

Only difference being, I guess, what you frame yourself as as you do the wrong thing.

Funny how that works out.

But today what we're going to highlight is another example, not NSO Group or Pegasus, even though I argue if we dive far enough, you will find background connections to these groups.

Another technology company that's found for a vast spy operation.

That's a direct quote.

This has been a continual ongoing deal.

So Kandaroo, the spyware vendor, was founded in Tel Aviv in 2014 and sells hacking tools to governments.

So very similar to NSO Group and some of the other outfits that are surveillance tech or malware tech.

It's famous for changing its corporate name four times in six years by Citizen Lab's count, including registering as Salto Tech.

S-A, or is it Salto? Oh, Saito.

And Microsoft had to patch Windows zero days that it was using as an exploitation.

So in November of 2021, the U.S. government put Kandaroo on its entity list.

a trade blacklist alongside NSO Group, the makers of Pegasus software, which I've also talked about in the past.

So in 2022, Kandaroo was caught using a Chrome zero day against journalists in Lebanon and Citizen Lab tied it to spyware or spying on Catalan independence figures in Spain as well.