“It steals all the information from your phone, it intercepts all the calls, all the texts, it steals all the emails, contacts, FaceTime calls. It also hacks any communication mechanisms you have on your phone. It steals all the information from the Gmail application, all the Facebook messages, all the Facebook information, your Facebook contacts, everything on Skype, WhatsApp, Viber, WeChat, Telegram, etc. August 2016, Lookout Vice President of Research Mike Murray and Citizen Lab, a digital rights watchdog at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, set foot in the biggest cyberespionage case in history.
At the helm, the Israeli company NSO Group, born in 2010 and discreetly established in Luxembourg via a string of companies four years later. A global outcry against a backdrop of revelations about the spying on journalists and activists in different countries: some were killed, others tortured and others constantly spied on.
State technology or not state technology?
And, eight years later, the irony has changed in nature: if the affair forced the NSO group to reinvent itself in another string of companies, always in Israel, always in Luxembourg and always in the United States, the giant Apple once again, at the end of October, asked the American justice system to forget its complaint. Too afraid that a trial will bring to light the security flaws of the technological company which has long marketed the inviolability of its technologies. However, it was via flaws that Apple engineers did not themselves know that the Israeli stars carried out their espionage.
Ironically, NSO Group’s American lawyers first tried to defend the idea that their company was linked to the Israeli state and that Apple could therefore not act against it, which the American justice system rejected. rejected, before the Israeli state decided, this year, to confiscate all the documents that NSO should have brought to it on a platter.
The end of the legal troubles is not for tomorrow, for NSO: at the end of September, four men residing in Great Britain (a Bahraini activist tortured by the Bahraini government, Yusuf al-Jamri; the founder and CEO of the Cordoba Foundation based in United Kingdom, Anas Altikriti; the British-Palestinian academic and activist, Azzam Tamimi, and the president of the Finsbury Park mosque in London, Mohammed Kozbar) seized British justice via a complaint prepared by Leanna Burnard, lawyer at the Global Legal Action Network, based in the United Kingdom, and supported by Monika Sobiecki, partner at the law firm Bindmans based in London. Targeted, according to certain media, are NSO Group (Israel); its parent company, Q Cyber Technologies (Luxembourg), and Novalpina Capital (London-based private equity firm that purchased NSO in 2019). In total, around thirty complaints of this type are awaiting legal action, in Israel, Spain, the United States and Colombia.
This week, as part of the bloody operations carried out in the Gaza Strip in response to the attack on Israel by Hamas a little over a year ago, the Committee for a Just Peace in the Middle East, associated to Action Solidarité Tiers Monde and Amnesty International, demanded that the Luxembourg government refer the matter to the authorities concerned by human rights violations so that they prevent NSO Group from continuing to serve its customers.
Property Discussions
According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office and public data in the Commercial Register, Novalpina is still in voluntary liquidation in Luxembourg after having paid a final dividend of almost 18 million euros to its shareholders in January 2021.
But one of the founders, Omri Lavie, regained control of the company, via his creditors and his new Luxembourg holding company, Dufresne Holding, according to the Israeli media Calcalist and according to documents registered in the Register of beneficial owners.
Omri Lavie has regained control of the three key entities of NSO Group, via its new holding company, Dufresne Holding. (Photo: Modern House)
Neither NSO Group nor the Americans from Treo Asset Management came back to us to take stock of the situation.
Having a foot directly in the United States would allow the group to get off the American blacklist by passing under American capital. And therefore for American agencies to access these technologies without risk. A New York Times investigation revealed that the FBI, CIA and NSA had created structures to be able to afford Pegasus and engage in targeted eavesdropping without their names being officially revealed in the event of a problem.
Second transparency report in three years
As it committed to in 2020, NSO published, in 2023, for the second time, its transparency report on its activities. Signed by its new CEO, Yaron Shohat, the report only gives a few numerical indications:
– it has 56 clients from 31 countries;
– 46% of these clients are justice-related organizations; 45% from intelligence agencies and the rest from military structures;
– from 2021 to the end of 2023, 10% of new opportunities had to be refused for reasons related to human rights, or $80 million per year over three-year contracts;
– in its risk analysis, 58 countries cannot access its technologies because they are unwilling or unable to comply with human rights;
– from 2021 to 2023, NSO opened 19 investigations for inappropriate use of its products.
Its products, because if we talk about Pegasus, the group would have put two other products on the market, just as “efficient”. At the same time, the group’s debacle has accelerated the growth of competing companies, often also created by former Israeli intelligence personnel. Boaz Goldman and Tal Dilian created Circles in 2011, registered in Cyprus and operating from Bulgaria, which was integrated into the NSO Group by the former majority shareholders, Francisco Partners, who acquired it for $130 million. Mr. Dilian is also at the origin of Intellexa, which has also attracted a lot of attention; of Cytrox, whose Predator also received media attention, and WiSpear (renamed Passitora), two companies that he manages from Cyprus. Or even the Irish Thalestris.
Boaz Goldman has “disappeared” from Luxembourg since 2019 – he was a director of Triangle Holdings, another branch which owned part of the NSO group companies. All these structures are today in the hands of the .
In Luxembourg, where the former Prime Minister and still head of diplomacy, (DP), had to backpedal on the use of Pegasus by Luxembourg intelligence, the Ministry of State refers to a parliamentary response.
Questioned by his former government colleague, now a deputy but then Minister of the Economy, (LSAP), for whom Luxembourg uses Pegasus, the head of government, (CSV), recalls that only the police and the service intelligence agencies may use this type of technology.
The police in the context of suspected crimes and offenses against state security or acts of terrorism and financing of terrorism, on the order of an investigating judge.
Intelligence in a context of espionage and interference; extremism with a violent propensity; terrorism; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction or defense-related products and related technologies; or organized crime and cyber threat, to the extent that they are linked to one of the preceding threats, here with the approval of a ministerial committee (made up of members of the government and the minister responsible for Intelligence), after the opinion of a special commission of magistrates (the president of the Superior Court of Justice, the president of the Administrative Court and the president of the Luxembourg district court) and for three months.
