According to four people familiar with the case, the iPhones of at least nine US State Department officials were hacked by an anonymous assailant using sophisticated spyware created by Israel’s NSO Group.
According to two of the sources, the attacks targeted US officials who were either located in Uganda or worked on problems relating to the East African country.
The intrusions first reported here, represent the widest known hacks of US officials through NSO technology. Previously, a list of numbers with potential targets including some American officials surfaced in reporting on NSO, but it was not clear whether intrusions were always tried or succeeded.
“If our investigation shall show these actions indeed happened with NSO’s tools, such customer will be terminated permanently and legal actions will take place,” said an NSO spokesperson, who added that NSO will also “cooperate with any relevant government authority and present the full information we will have.”
NSO has long said it only sells its products to government law enforcement and intelligence clients, helping them to monitor security threats, and is not directly involved in surveillance operations.
Officials at the Uganda embassy in Washington did not comment. A spokesperson for Apple declined to comment.
A State Department official declined to comment on the intrusions, pointing instead to the Commerce Department’s recent decision to put the Israeli firm on an entity list, making it more difficult for US firms to do business with them.
