Israeli spyware giant NSO Group ordered to pay nearly $170M to WhatsApp for hacking accounts www.politico.com/news/2025…

Israeli spyware company NSO Group was ordered by a U.S. federal court on Tuesday to pay WhatsApp and its parent company Meta almost $170 million in damages after its cyber tools were used to hack around 1,400 WhatsApp accounts.

NSO Group has become the poster child in recent years for the mostly underground spyware market, used increasingly by governments to surveil dissidents, journalists and politicians. The ruling, the latest step in a process that began in 2019, is a major win for privacy advocates and those pushing back against NSO Group’s controversial Pegasus software.

According to a spokesperson for Meta, the ruling involves NSO Group paying punitive damages of around $167 million to WhatsApp on top of more than $440,000 in compensatory damages after one day of jury deliberation. This stems from an effort linked to NSO Group to exploit video calling systems and send malware to around 1,400 WhatsApp users in 2019, many of whom worked for civil society groups. WhatsApp filed a complaint in court after the plot was discovered.