A US court in California will hold a hearing on the 13th of this month for a case brought by WhatsApp and its parent company, Facebook, on "NSO" and "Qcyber" for spying on hundreds of phones in the United States.
Case documents indicate that the Israeli "NSO" spied on 1,400 mobile phones for US officials, activists, journalists, lawyers, and jurists.
Court documents included the reports of the New York Times, which accused Saudi Arabia of trying to spy on one of its journalists, using the Israeli company’s technology.
FTi Consulting, which represents Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, said that the Israeli company may have provided software that was used to hack the Bezos phone after receiving a video from a WhatsApp account of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
A person interrogated by the FBI said the investigation began in 2017 when the agency tried to find out whether NSO had obtained from US hackers any code it needed to hack smartphones.
Two others also said that the FBI conducted further interviews with technology sector experts after Facebook filed a lawsuit last October, accusing the Israeli company of exploiting a defect in WhatsApp to penetrate the accounts of hundreds of users.