‘Amoral 21st-century mercenaries’: problems mount for NSO Group

Israeli spyware firm goes from bad to worse as scathing Apple lawsuit follows US blacklisting

Shalev Hulio, the co-founder of Israel’s NSO Group, was in Washington DC on a mission to try to resuscitate the surveillance company’s battered reputation on Capitol Hill shortly before the news broke that he had probably arrived too late to make a difference.

With little advance warning to its allies in Israel, the Biden administration announced on 3 November that it was putting the spyware maker – one of the most sophisticated cyber-weapons companies in the world – on a US blacklist, citing use of the company’s software by regimes around the world for “transnational repression”.