WASHINGTON (Middle East Eye) – The iPhones of at least nine U.S. State Department employees were hacked by an unknown assailant using spyware developed by the Zionist NSO Group, Reuters reported.
The hacks, which took place in the last several months, focused on U.S. officials either based in Uganda or working on matters related to the East African country.
The NSO Group said in a statement that it did not have any indication their tools were used but cancelled the relevant accounts and said they would investigate based on the Reuters inquiry.
The U.S. government put the NSO Group on a blacklist last month after revelations that its software had been used by a host of countries to spy on journalists, government officials and activists.
NSO software operates by capturing encrypted messages, photos and other sensitive information from infected phones, turning them into recording devices to monitor surroundings.
Apple’s alert to affected users did not name the creator of the spyware used in this hack.
The victims notified by Apple included American citizens and were easily identifiable as U.S. government employees because they associated email addresses ending in state.gov with their Apple IDs, sources told Reuters.
They and other targets notified by Apple in multiple countries were infected through the same graphics processing vulnerability that Apple did not fix until September, the sources said.
Since at least February, this software flaw allowed some NSO customers to take control of iPhones simply by sending invisible yet tainted iMessage requests to the device, researchers who investigated the espionage campaign said.
Historically, some of the NSO Group’s best-known past clients included Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico.
The Zionist war ministry must approve export licenses for NSO, which has close ties to the regime’s military and espionage communities, to sell its technology internationally.