UNITED STATES, WASHINGTON (VOP TODAY NEWS) — An Israeli spy company believed to have hacked the Watsab site in the past has told its customers it can get user data from the world’s largest social networking site, the Financial Times reported on Friday.
NSA told its customers that “the technology it owns can remove all user data secretly from Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft servers, according to people familiar with the company’s methods of promoting sales.”
A spokesman for the company denied this in a written statement in response to a query by AFP on the report.
“There is a great misunderstanding of the company, its services and technologies,” he said.
The company’s products “do not provide information gathering capabilities and access to applications, services and cloud infrastructure as the Financial Times article points out today,” he said.
In May, Facebook-owned Watsab announced that it had launched an update to fill a security vulnerability in its messaging application that allowed the introduction of sophisticated programs that could be used to spy on journalists, activists and others.
He said the attack “bears the hallmarks of a private company working with a number of governments around the world.”
But Joseph Hall, a Washington analyst and chief technology expert at the Center for Democracy and Technology, said at the time that the piracy was linked to the Pegasus program produced by NSA.
This program is usually sold to law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
The Financial Times report, which was based on documents seen by the paper and described the program, was developed to “collect more information stored outside of the phone devices in the cloud, such as the full date of the target person’s location data, letters or archive images.”
NSO confirms that it does not operate the Pegasus program, but only works for government employees after checking their records closely “to prevent or investigate serious crimes such as terrorism.”
The company was highlighted in 2016 when it was accused by investigators of helping to spy on an activist in the UAE.
The company is based in the Israeli city of Herzliya, near Tel Aviv, which is a center of advanced technology.
It says it employs 600 people in Israel and around the world.
Pegasus is a powerful spy program that is said to be able to turn on the camera and the microphone in the target person’s phone and access his data, that is, turning the phone into a spy tool.
“Increasing numbers of terrorists and sophisticated criminals are taking advantage of encrypted technologies to plan and cover their crimes, hiding information about law enforcement and intelligence and endangering the public safety and national security,” the company said in a statement.
“NOS’s legal monitoring products are designed to meet this challenge.”
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