San Francisco (AFP)

WhatsApp announced Tuesday that it has filed a lawsuit against NSO group, a spur-of-war Israeli company specializing in spyware and accused of assisting governments from the Middle East to Mexico to spy on activists and journalists.

The encrypted email application owned by Facebook admitted to may have been infected by spyware giving access to the content of smartphones.

"After months of investigation, we can say who led this attack," said Will Cathcart, the boss of WhatsApp, in an editorial in an American daily.

He accuses NSO of targeting "100 human rights defenders, journalists and other members of civil society around the world".

"We discovered that the attackers had used servers and Internet hosts whose links with NSO have already been established in the past," he says. "And we were able to link some WhatsApp accounts used during this malicious operation to NSO, their attack was very sophisticated, but they were not entirely able to erase their traces."

In all, 1,400 devices were infected from April 29 to May 10, in various countries including the Kingdom of Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Mexico, according to the complaint filed in federal court.

NSO, a company based in Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, in the Israeli "Silicon Valley", claimed in May that its technology was "commercialized through licenses to governments for the sole purpose of combating crime and terrorism".

The hackers had exploited a security hole by inserting malicious software in phones, simply by calling the users of the application, used by 1.5 billion people around the world.

They were able to activate the microphone and camera of Apple or Android devices (Google) targeted to listen to or view the environment of the owners, without them realizing it.

- Coded messages -

"This should serve as a warning to tech companies, governments and all Internet users, tools that allow us to spy on our private lives are misused." When this technology is found in the hands of companies and governments irresponsible, it puts us all in danger, "Will Cathcart adds.

Facebook is subject to several investigations in the United States, including its management of personal data and the protection of privacy.

The social networking giant, who also owns Instagram, has been widely criticized since a massive data leak and voter manipulation scandal in 2016, during political campaigns in the United States (presidential election) and the United Kingdom. United (Brexit).

The Californian group has since tried to restore trust with its users and the authorities, fighting against misinformation, false accounts, foreign propaganda operations, and better protecting its digital infrastructures.

He is engaged in a standoff with the US government, which has asked him to seek a technical solution to ensure that law enforcement can have access to encrypted data in case of serious crimes - in other words, a "door" stolen "in the Facebook security system.

"Democracies are based on a strong, independent press and civil society, and the security of the tools they use endangers them, and we want to protect our personal information and our private conversations. continue to oppose the government's calls to weaken end-to-end encryption, "Cathcart notes in his editorial.

This encryption scrambles messages and ensures that only the sender and the recipient have the "keys" to read them. This is already the case of Whatsapp and Facebook now wants to extend this encryption to the popular Messenger application.

© 2019 AFP