NSO Group faces lawsuit over spyware activity

Israeli spyware company NSO Group has been sued by at least 22 journalists and staff at Salvadoran news outlet El Faro for allowing phone surveillance that is in violation of U.S. state and federal laws, according to CyberScoop. NSO Group's Pegasus spyware has been leveraged to spy on El Faro's staffers from June 2020 to November 2021, when the reporters have been covering the Salvadoran government's abuses, noted the lawsuit. Aside from seeking to require NSO Group to determine, return, and delete all information gathered from the spyware activity, the lawsuit has also called to ban NSO Group from future Pegasus deployment against the journalists, as well as require the firm to name the party who leveraged the spyware in the attacks. El Faro and other news outlets were reported in January by Citizen Lab and Access Now to have been targeted by Pegasus during an investigation on Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele and the Salvadoran government.