US firm looking to acquire Israeli NSO
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According to Haaretz, two investors have shown interest, and negotiations with Integrity Partners, which seeks to acquire control of the Israeli NSO, are in advance stages.
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The Israeli NSO spyware was found to have been used to hack the devices of many human rights activists and politicians.
The Israeli spyware firm NSO is seeking to transfer ownership of the company to a US venture capital firm, Integrity Partners, in the aftermath of its blacklisting by the US.
According to Haaretz, two investors have shown interest, and negotiations with Integrity Partners, having included a formal letter of intent, are in advance stages.
Integrity Partners aspires to form a special firm called Integrity Labs that will overtake NSO, providing $300 million to the corporation in order to restore it.
The proposal calls for canceling or limiting most of the company's previous clients from 37 to only five: the Five Eyes Anglosphere intelligence partnership of New Zealand, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Canada. As part of its rebranding push, the business will first focus on "defensive" cyber goods.
Integrity Partners is acquiring control in an attempt to persuade the United States administration to remove NSO off the blacklist, as well as to deal with the pressure and lawsuits from Apple, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Citizen Lab, Amnesty, and others while continuing to create Pegasus spyware.
Integrity's partners are former US military with crucial relationships to US administration officials, contacts which may be used to create collaborations and discover new clients in the US.
On Tuesday, a court allowed a temporary trustee to be appointed for three NSO companies claiming they deal with "defensive" rather than offensive cyber tools and say they will not be able to pay employee wages in February.
The firms claim that the Israeli company's CEO Shalev Hulio is not acting in their best interests and linking them instead to companies on the US blacklist in order to facilitate the sale of the entire group.
NSO responded that the claims are " full of tendentious inaccuracies and half-truths. A number of U.S. venture capital firms are very interested, and we are conducting contacts with all of them. Any other report is incorrect.”
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Pegasus: an Israeli hacking spyware
Tens of thousands of activists, journalists, and politicians were listed as potential targets of the Israeli NSO Pegasus spyware.
US authorities blacklisted NSO in November, and Facebook and Apple have sued the company after the spyware was discovered on devices belonging to dissidents and journalists.
In November, former Israeli occupation soldiers revealed they had photographed thousands of Palestinians to build a database for a facial recognition surveillance program, dubbed Blue Wolf, in Al-Khalil city, in the West Bank.
In 2020, Microsoft divested from Israeli facial recognition firm AnyVision, now renamed Oosto, over the company's alleged involvement in surveilling Palestinians.
