Why Apple dropped its lawsuit against NSO

Apple has tried to present itself as fighting the phenomenon of iPhone hacking by states and security organizations, and three years ago filed a lawsuit in San Francisco against the Israeli cyberattack company NSO. At the time, the company was the subject of investigative reports by journalists around the world, and a symbol of the Biden administration’s fight against mobile phone hacking and surveillance.

Until 2021, Herzliya-based NSO was the world’s largest provider of software for hacking phones and monitoring suspects, offering its services to dozens of countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Mexico, India, France and Germany. But since then, the company has lost much of its market share, and the U.S. government has imposed a number of restrictions on Israeli cyberintelligence companies, leading some to shut down.

Surveillance software like that developed by NSO allows security services to hack into suspects’ phones and monitor them through the phone’s camera, microphone, and location services, and read emails and chats. It has become a highly effective way to locate terrorists, but some have alleged that authoritarian regimes use it unauthorizedly to monitor political dissidents. The industry has been divided between companies that comply with the Defense Ministry’s export controls, such as NSO and Paragon, and companies created by Israelis abroad that do not comply with Israeli law, including Intellexa.

national security matter

Earlier this week, Apple decided to withdraw its lawsuit against NSO, citing two troubling reasons. The first relates to an ongoing case, WhatsApp’s lawsuit against NSO. Apple says that in order to prove its claims against NSO, it is requesting documents from the company, but in the WhatsApp case, Israeli government agencies are known to have seized documents from NSO and sought to prevent sensitive information from falling into American hands, according to a Guardian report that Apple cited in its request.

What was behind the deleted documents? They appear to be agreements between the State of Israel, other countries, and NSO. The information includes commercial agreements, order specifications, and restrictions on each — commercial and security information that is typically known only to the parties and the Defense Export Controls Agency at the Defense Ministry, which ultimately relates to national security.

“While Apple takes no position on the veracity or falsity of the Guardian story described above, its existence is cause for concern about Apple’s ability to obtain the discovery it needs,” the Washington Post quoted Apple’s filing as saying.

Another, equally surprising reason for Apple to walk away from its legal battle with NSO is that the evidence it must present at trial about how it discovered its phones were hacked could prove to be a double-edged sword, revealing to the world how it protects its users from such hacks. More seriously, the accounts of the lawyers involved in the trial could be hacked by people interested in obtaining this information, the company has suggested.

Overall, Apple is cleverly using its withdrawal from the lawsuit to boost its image and publicize its cyber capabilities. It portrays the importance of its ability to protect not only against spyware but against all types of cyber attacks, and claims that any information revealed in the course of the case would be of interest to many potential hackers.

Apple took pains to point out how the private warnings it sent to iPhone users about their devices being hacked helped NGOs and the media investigate, and prompted them to analyze the software code and learn more about the spyware companies’ methods. It also mentioned a new “lockdown mode” that limits the ways in which an iPhone can be attacked. Apple concluded by saying that it would rather invest in developing new protections for users than fight a legal battle with NSO.

This article was published in Globes, Israeli Business News – en.globes.co.il – on September 19, 2024.

© Copyright Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2024.