That's NSO Group, the controversial Israeli cyber-intelligence firm that spies on journalists and politicians

Israeli Shalev Hulio's Twitter account has only 174 followers. Sometimes months go by between posts. It could be the profile of any user of this social network, but it is that of one of the founders of the NSO Group, the controversial cyber-intelligence firm singled out for spying on journalists and politicians around the world. The company's success is almost as great as the controversy it generates, and it is already worth more than $1 billion. Despite the discreet digital identity on Twitter of one of its founders, the company has been the talk of the town in the media in Spain and Morocco in the last two weeks for alleged cases of espionage. 

With respect to Spain, the research center of the University of Toronto Citizen Lab has warned that NSO has sold the software Pegasus with which the mobile phone of the president of the Parliament of Catalonia, Roger Torrent, was spied on, as well as that of Ernest Maragall and other personalities of the Catalan independence movement.

The Government of Catalonia has accused the CNI (National Intelligence Centre) of having bought this tool to spy on Catalan politicians. John Scott-Railton, the chief investigator of Citizen Lab, has pointed out in declarations to the Efe agency that the intrusion suffered by Spanish politicians "is very worrying" and that it is the first time that this programme has been used against European leaders. The Moroccan authorities have also been accused by Amnesty International of spying on a journalist's mobile phone using Israeli software, although they have denied this and asked the organisation for reliable evidence of this alleged monitoring.

The company has also been pointed out across the Atlantic. The United States accused the NSO Group of spying on 1,400 mobile phones in 2019 and has also linked the company to the mobile hacking of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, a cyber attack on WhatsApp and even cyber spying on celebrities and human rights activists in countries such as Saudi Arabia, the United States, Yemen, Israel, Turkey, Thailand, Qatar, Kenya, Uzbekistan, Mozambique, Morocco and Hungary. 

Citizen Lab and Lookout published in 2016 that the Pegasus software had been used to spy on Egyptian Al Jazeera journalist Ahmed Mansoor, and in 2017 they reported that the Pegasus program was used to spy on members of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights investigating the disappearance of 43 students in Guerrero State, Mexico. 

NSO Group was founded in 2010 by Niv Carmi, Omri Lavie and Shalev Hulio and is focused on creating intrusion and surveillance software that only sells to governments. The three partners had worked as agents of the Israeli Army's cyber-intelligence corps. Their goal was to help authorities monitor and capture terrorists, drug dealers or pedophiles through the use of technology. 

The company's first big break came in 2012, when the Mexican government hired its services to fight drug trafficking. They were paid 20 million dollars and thanks to the company's software the famous Mexican drug trafficker Chapo Guzman was captured. The company's popularity rose like crazy and the Francisco Partners fund bought it for 130 million dollars. Just one year later NSO Group already had 500 employees and the fund that owned the company put it up for sale for $1 billion dollars. In 2019, Hulio and Lavie bought back the company with the help of a British investment fund. 

In October 2012, Israel declared the Pegasus software to be sold by NSO Group as a weapon, thus depriving the owners of the freedom to sell it to whomever they wanted. Only governments authorized by Israel can get hold of it and private companies cannot buy it. 

The Pegasus application accesses mobile phone data through a video call or with a malicious link sent through an SMS. Once inside the phone, the software can listen to calls, enter browsing history, activate the camera and microphone, and view the contents of Gmail, WhatsApp, Facebook, Telegram or Skype, according to a report by Citizen Lab that was accessed by the newspaper El País. It can also access the user's cloud data and even impersonate them in e-mail, according to the Financial Times.