Israel’s NSO Group was handed a $168 million penalty by a federal jury in California on Tuesday for hijacking the servers of WhatsApp in order to hack users of the Meta-owned chat platform on behalf of foreign spy agencies.

The case caps a six-year battle between the American social media giant and the surveillance firm. It has also cast an unusual amount of light on the inner workings of the spyware industry.

Between 2018 and 2020, the Israeli spyware firm was responsible for breaking into thousands of devices, according to Tamir Gazneli, NSO’s vice president of research and development.

During the trial, Gazneli said he disagreed with the idea that his company sold “spyware,” leading to an exchange with Meta lawyer Antonio Perez in which Gazneli insisted his firm’s tools were used to gather intelligence on targets but “not people.”

“You don’t consider the targets people, Mr. Gazneli?” Perez asked him.

“That’s not what I said,” he........

© The Times of Israel