US Judge Finds Israel's NSO Group Liable for Hacking in WhatsApp Lawsuit

Israeli cyber firm NSO Group's exhibition stand is seen at "ISDEF 2019", an international defense and homeland security expo, in Tel Aviv, Israel June 4, 2019. REUTERS/Keren Manor/File Photo
Israeli cyber firm NSO Group's exhibition stand is seen at "ISDEF 2019", an international defense and homeland security expo, in Tel Aviv, Israel June 4, 2019. REUTERS/Keren Manor/File Photo
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US Judge Finds Israel's NSO Group Liable for Hacking in WhatsApp Lawsuit

Israeli cyber firm NSO Group's exhibition stand is seen at "ISDEF 2019", an international defense and homeland security expo, in Tel Aviv, Israel June 4, 2019. REUTERS/Keren Manor/File Photo
Israeli cyber firm NSO Group's exhibition stand is seen at "ISDEF 2019", an international defense and homeland security expo, in Tel Aviv, Israel June 4, 2019. REUTERS/Keren Manor/File Photo

A US judge ruled on Friday in favor of Meta Platforms' WhatsApp in a lawsuit accusing Israel's NSO Group of exploiting a bug in the messaging app to install spy software allowing unauthorized surveillance.

US District Judge Phyllis Hamilton in Oakland, California, granted a motion by WhatsApp and found NSO liable for hacking and breach of contract.

The case will now proceed to a trial only on the issue of damages, Hamilton said. NSO Group did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment, according to Reuters.

Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, said the ruling is a win for privacy.

"We spent five years presenting our case because we firmly believe that spyware companies could not hide behind immunity or avoid accountability for their unlawful actions," Cathcart said in a social media post.

"Surveillance companies should be on notice that illegal spying will not be tolerated."

Cybersecurity experts welcomed the judgment.

John Scott-Railton, a senior researcher with Canadian internet watchdog Citizen Lab — which first brought to light NSO’s Pegasus spyware in 2016 — called the judgment a landmark ruling with “huge implications for the spyware industry.”

“The entire industry has hidden behind the claim that whatever their customers do with their hacking tools, it's not their responsibility,” he said in an instant message. “Today's ruling makes it clear that NSO Group is in fact responsible for breaking numerous laws.”

WhatsApp in 2019 sued NSO seeking an injunction and damages, accusing it of accessing WhatsApp servers without permission six months earlier to install the Pegasus software on victims' mobile devices. The lawsuit alleged the intrusion allowed the surveillance of 1,400 people, including journalists, human rights activists and dissidents.

NSO had argued that Pegasus helps law enforcement and intelligence agencies fight crime and protect national security and that its technology is intended to help catch terrorists, pedophiles and hardened criminals.

NSO appealed a trial judge's 2020 refusal to award it "conduct-based immunity," a common law doctrine protecting foreign officials acting in their official capacity.

Upholding that ruling in 2021, the San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals called it an "easy case" because NSO's mere licensing of Pegasus and offering technical support did not shield it from liability under a federal law called the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, which took precedence over common law.

The US Supreme Court last year turned away NSO's appeal of the lower court's decision, allowing the lawsuit to proceed.



Microsoft Creates Chip It Says Shows Quantum Computers Are ‘Years, Not Decades’ Away

Microsoft's Majorana 1 quantum computing chip is pictured in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters on February 19, 2025. (Courtesy of Microsoft/Handout via Reuters)
Microsoft's Majorana 1 quantum computing chip is pictured in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters on February 19, 2025. (Courtesy of Microsoft/Handout via Reuters)
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Microsoft Creates Chip It Says Shows Quantum Computers Are ‘Years, Not Decades’ Away

Microsoft's Majorana 1 quantum computing chip is pictured in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters on February 19, 2025. (Courtesy of Microsoft/Handout via Reuters)
Microsoft's Majorana 1 quantum computing chip is pictured in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters on February 19, 2025. (Courtesy of Microsoft/Handout via Reuters)

Microsoft on Wednesday unveiled a new chip that it said showed quantum computing is "years, not decades" away, joining Google and IBM in predicting that a fundamental change in computing technology is much closer than recently believed.

Quantum computing holds the promise of carrying out calculations that would take today's systems millions of years and could unlock discoveries in medicine, chemistry and many other fields where near-infinite seas of possible combinations of molecules confound classical computers.

Quantum computers also hold the danger of upending today's cybersecurity systems, where most encryption relies on the assumption that it would take too long to brute force gain access.

The biggest challenge of quantum computers is that a fundamental building block called a qubit, which is similar to a bit in classical computing, is incredibly fast but also extremely difficult to control and prone to errors.

Microsoft said the Majorana 1 chip it has developed is less prone to those errors than rivals and provided as evidence a scientific paper set to be published in academic journal Nature.

When useful quantum computers will arrive has become a topic of debate in the upper echelons of the tech industry. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said last month that the technology was two decades away from overtaking his company's chips, the workhorses of artificial intelligence, reflecting broad skepticism.

Those remarks prompted Google, which last year showed off its own new quantum chip, to say that commercial quantum computing applications are only five years away. IBM has said large-scale quantum computers will be online by 2033.

Microsoft's Majorana 1 has been in the works for nearly two decades and relies on a subatomic particle called the Majorana fermion whose existence was first theorized in the 1930s. That particle has properties that make it less prone to the errors that plague quantum computers, but it has been hard for physicists to find and control.

Microsoft said it created the Majorana 1 chip with indium arsenide and aluminum. The device uses a superconducting nanowire to observe the particles and can be controlled with standard computing equipment.

The chip Microsoft revealed Wednesday has far fewer qubits than rival chips from Google and IBM, but Microsoft believes that far fewer of its Majorana-based qubits will be needed to make useful computers because the error rates are lower.

Microsoft did not give a timeline for when the chip would be scaled up to create quantum computers that can outstrip today's machines, but the company said in a blog post that point was "years, not decades" away.

Jason Zander, the Microsoft executive vice president who oversees the company's long-term strategic bets, described Majorana 1 as a "high risk, high reward" strategy.

The chip was fabricated at Microsoft labs in Washington state and Denmark.

"The hardest part has been solving the physics. There is no textbook for this, and we had to invent it," Zander said in an interview with Reuters. "We literally have invented the ability to go create this thing, atom by atom, layer by layer."

Philip Kim, a professor of physics at Harvard University who was not involved in Microsoft's research, said that Majorana fermions have been a hot topic among physicists for decades and called Microsoft's work an "exciting development" that put the company at the forefront of quantum research.

He also said that Microsoft's use of a hybrid between traditional semiconductors and exotic superconductors appeared to be a good route toward chips that can be scaled up into more powerful chips.

"Although there's no demonstration (of this scaling up) yet, what they are doing is really successful," Kim said.