YO GUYS—another round in Meta versus NSO Group and it is getting intense! Meta just formally asked a court to hold NSO in contempt because they caught the company violating its permanent injunction against targeting WhatsApp users. You already know NSO built Pegasus, but this latest move came after Discord-style spear phishing attempts where NSO tried to trick people into clicking malicious links that drove them off WhatsApp and onto external sites. They even made test accounts on the platform which Meta promptly nuked, all while calling out NSO as a blacklisted company already on the government's Entity List since 2021 for targeting journalists and activists with spyware.
Let me catch you up because this saga has been going a minute and there are some wild numbers involved. The original case started in 2019, alleging NSO infected roughly 1400 phones to install their software through the WhatsApp client—which required reverse-engineering Meta's code specifically to bypass security features! A jury originally awarded over $167 million in damages against NSO but a judge slashed that down before settling on a permanent injunction. Meanwhile, NSO has been appealing and they literally told the court in a filing that this injunction threatens their only real business because Pegasus supposedly accounted for 100 percent of their sales in 2025! That is insane — an entire company's revenue line riding on one software product while they keep trying to dodge court orders.
This isn't just corporate bickering; it has actual consequences for how we think about privacy and state surveillance. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia even filed an amicus brief supporting Meta because Pegasus lets governments take over a phone — GPS, messages, calls, passwords, web history — all accessible even when the user thinks they're protected by encryption! Every one of those points matters for journalists, activists, and anyone who wants their personal data private. I love seeing a tech giant use legal force to push back on spyware because accountability is rare in this space, and NSO continuing to ignore court orders makes them look less like a legitimate business and more like an entity that operates beyond the law.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/meta-alleges-nso-violated-spyware-injunction-with-new-whatsapp-attacks/
Let me catch you up because this saga has been going a minute and there are some wild numbers involved. The original case started in 2019, alleging NSO infected roughly 1400 phones to install their software through the WhatsApp client—which required reverse-engineering Meta's code specifically to bypass security features! A jury originally awarded over $167 million in damages against NSO but a judge slashed that down before settling on a permanent injunction. Meanwhile, NSO has been appealing and they literally told the court in a filing that this injunction threatens their only real business because Pegasus supposedly accounted for 100 percent of their sales in 2025! That is insane — an entire company's revenue line riding on one software product while they keep trying to dodge court orders.
This isn't just corporate bickering; it has actual consequences for how we think about privacy and state surveillance. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia even filed an amicus brief supporting Meta because Pegasus lets governments take over a phone — GPS, messages, calls, passwords, web history — all accessible even when the user thinks they're protected by encryption! Every one of those points matters for journalists, activists, and anyone who wants their personal data private. I love seeing a tech giant use legal force to push back on spyware because accountability is rare in this space, and NSO continuing to ignore court orders makes them look less like a legitimate business and more like an entity that operates beyond the law.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/06/meta-alleges-nso-violated-spyware-injunction-with-new-whatsapp-attacks/