New Delhi: NSO Group, the maker of the notorious spyware Pegasus, has been deemed worthless to its private equity backers and has not received any new customer bookings since July 2021, according to the Financial Times.NSO Group was purchased by Novalpina Capital, a private equity firm, for $1 billion in 2019, but it is “abundantly clear” that the equity in NSO is “valueless”, according to court filings submitted by the consultancy firm that was brought in to manage the fund.The court filings were part of a case heard in London’s high court, according to FT. Berkeley Research Group (BRG), the consultancy firm, is suing two founders of Novalpina Capital for a “malign and unpredictable campaign” to take back control of the private equity fund. Novalpina’s three co-founders were removed from controlling the fund by investors last year. BRG was brought in to replace them.According to FT, Proskauer, the law firm representing the fund, also believes the equity in NSO is worthless.Also Read: Senior EU Officials Were Targeted With Israeli SpywareSignificantly, the court filings also admit that “no new customer bookings to use the Pegasus hacking tool since July 2021”, the newspaper reported. This was when the Pegasus Project, a consortium of media organisations that included The Wire, revealed that the intrusive spyware was used by governments around the world to target journalists, politicians and civil society members – though NSO had claimed that the cyberweapon is only used against terrorist groups and criminal gangs.Subsequent to the revelations, NSO Group was blacklisted by the US government – at which point its demise was widely predicted. The company was also sued by Apple to hold it accountable for “surveillance and targeting” of the company’s users. WhatsApp had previously sued the Israeli company.The court filings were made by Finbarr O’Connor, head of BRG’s asset management arm, who added that NSO faced “an imminent liquidity crisis” towards the end of 2021 and could not “service or repay its debts and ultimately ‘entered into a forbearance with its lenders’”.However, an NSO spokesperson rejected the claims made in the court filings, telling FT, “NSO products continue to be in strong demand from clients across the world who rely upon our technologies to save lives and protect the public.”“It is unfortunate that this legal matter, which has no relation to NSO, is being used to make assertions about the company that are incorrect,” the spokesperson said, according to the newspaper.A New York Times story, published in January this year, had claimed that Israel used the spyware as a diplomatic tool, arguing that the government’s “ability to approve or deny access to NSO’s cyberweapons has become entangled with its diplomacy”.The story also revealed that the Indian government had purchased Pegasus as the centrepiece of a larger $2 billion defence deal with Israel. The government has so far not denied purchasing the spyware, only using the refrain that there was “no illegal surveillance”.Also read: Pegasus Project: 174 Individuals Revealed by the Wire on Snoop List So FarAmong confirmed Indian targets of Pegasus were the political strategist Prashant Kishor and The Wire‘s co-founders Siddharth Varadarajan and M.K. Venu. Several high-profile politicians – including Rahul Gandhi, Union minister Ashwini Vaishnaw – were also potential tagets of the spyware.
