Hello folks,
As I said earlier, I’m catching up on some news that I haven’t read, and soon we’ll cover stuff I’ve read that never saw the light of day on podcasts or the blog.
This time, it looks like we’ve got a timneline of whats going on here at NSO, and of course, it doesn’t look good.
The secret Uganda deal that has brought NSO to the brink of collapse is the article title and it definitely seems to be worth the read, seeing how the story of the downgrade was made on the money borrowed was discussed, the company defaulting on loans borrowed in 2019, and other things that have been covered as well.
From what the article says, the NSO group now wants to turn Pegasus in to a defensive operation to please the United States, but i wonder if that is past time now.
Only time will tell.
Here are several paragraphs which start the narative of what seems to be a full timeline.
In February 2019, an Israeli woman sat across from the son of Uganda’s president, and made an audacious pitch—would he want to secretly hack any phone in the world?
Lt. General Muhoozi Kainerugaba, in charge of his father’s security and a long-whispered successor to Yoweri Museveni, was keen, said two people familiar with the sales pitch.
After all, the woman, who had ties to Israeli intelligence, was pitching him Pegasus, a piece of spyware so powerful that Middle East dictators and autocratic regimes had been paying tens of millions for it for years.
But for NSO, the Israeli company that created Pegasus, this dalliance into east Africa would prove to be the moment it crossed a red line, infuriating US diplomats and triggering a chain of events that would see it blacklisted by the commerce department, pursued by Apple, and driven to the verge of defaulting on its loans, according to interviews with US and Israeli officials, industry insiders and NSO employees.
A few months after the initial approach, NSO’s chief executive, Shalev Hulio, landed in Uganda to seal the deal, according to two people familiar with NSO’s east Africa business. Hulio, who flew the world with the permission of the Israeli government to sell Pegasus, liked to demonstrate in real time how it could hack a brand new, boxed, iPhone.
The eventual business was small for NSO. A person familiar with the transaction said it brought in between $10 million and $20 million, a fraction of the $243 million that Moody’s estimated the privately owned NSO made in revenues in 2020.
But about two years after the sales pitch, someone deployed Pegasus to try to hack the phones of 11 American diplomats and employees of the US embassy in Uganda, according to two US officials, who spoke after notifications were sent out by Apple when the iPhone maker discovered and closed a flaw in its operating system in November.
This is only the beginning of a much longer story worth reading. Have fun with this one!As I said, some of this we knew, some we didn’t. You be the judge.