WhatsApp has asked a United States (US) court to hold spyware maker NSO Group in contempt for violating a permanent injunction that barred the firm from ever targeting WhatsApp and its users, parent company Meta said on June 8, 2026. Meta alleges it caught fresh attacks linked to NSO, the Israeli firm behind the Pegasus spyware that the US government blacklisted in 2021.
This is the first alleged breach of the injunction WhatsApp won in October 2025, after a court found NSO liable for hacking under federal and state law.
Why this matters: NSO continues to operate while the question of who deployed Pegasus against Indian citizens remains unanswered. Pegasus targeted 1,223 users across 51 countries, with India being the second-most targeted country after Mexico, with 100 victims, including:
- Congress politician Rahul Gandhi.
- Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology Ashwini Vaishnaw.
- Siddharth Varadarajan, founding editor of The Wire.
India’s accountability process has stalled, even as US litigation has advanced. In 2021, the Supreme Court appointed a technical committee to determine whether the government used Pegasus against citizens, who purchased it, and whether such use was permitted under the law. The committee examined 29 phones and found malware on five of them but could not confirm the presence of Pegasus. The then Chief Justice of India noted that the government did not cooperate with the probe.
In April 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that it would not make the committee’s report public. Justice Surya Kant remarked that there is nothing wrong with a country possessing spyware; the question is against whom a government uses it. He also said that the report could not become “a document for discussion on the streets”. As a result, while a US court has identified NSO as a lawbreaker, India has neither confirmed nor denied purchasing the same tool allegedly used against its own citizens.
What Meta says it caught: Acting on user reports, Meta says it disrupted NSO-linked social engineering attempts that:
- Tried to trick people into clicking malicious links leading to external websites outside WhatsApp, mirroring earlier one-click phishing campaigns tied to NSO.
- Relied on test accounts and groups created by NSO on WhatsApp, which Meta subsequently took down.
Meta is sharing threat indicators so that anyone can check whether NSO-linked attempts targeted them across any platform, including text messages, email, or WhatsApp.
What Meta is asking the court: Meta wants the court to hold NSO in contempt of the permanent injunction. The timing is significant because it cuts against NSO’s own legal strategy. NSO appealed the liability finding, the injunction, and the damages award to the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in November 2025, and asked the trial judge to pause the injunction while the appeal is pending. Meta’s contempt filing seeks to show that NSO should…
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