During a high-profile legal battle between WhatsApp (owned by Meta) and the Israeli cyber-intelligence firm NSO Group, the company’s attorney, Joe Akrotirianakis, made a stunning disclosure: he named the governments of Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and Uzbekistan as NSO clients.
This marks the first time NSO has officially and publicly acknowledged which state actors have purchased its controversial Pegasus spyware. Until now, the company had consistently cited confidentiality obligations and refused to disclose any client information.
The case stems from a lawsuit filed by Meta in 2019, accusing NSO of exploiting a vulnerability in WhatsApp to breach 1,400 accounts between April and May of that year. According to WhatsApp, more than 100 of the targeted users were journalists, activists, and members of civil society organizations. Citizen Lab, a Canadian research group, played a crucial role in identifying and verifying many of the victims of the cyberattack.
During the hearing, Akrotirianakis revealed that a total of eight government clients are named in court documents, though he only disclosed three in open court. This hints that the full list of 51 countries where Pegasus victims have been identified may include additional NSO customers. Notably, while Saudi Arabia was named as a client, it does not appear among the countries with known victims—suggesting that some attacks may have been conducted beyond the borders of client states.
NSO did not deny that the three governments named were clients during the period in question. Both Amnesty International and Citizen Lab have previously documented widespread use of Pegasus to monitor journalists and human rights activists in countries such as Mexico, Hungary, Spain, and the United Arab Emirates.
This revelation also casts a renewed spotlight on the unresolved wiretapping scandal in Greece, which has remained open since 2022. That case involves Predator spyware, developed by the Intellexa consortium. Despite widespread reports of surveillance targeting politicians, journalists, and business figures, the origin and end-users of Predator have yet to be fully uncovered. If mounting international pressure or the ongoing Greek judicial probe leads Intellexa to follow NSO’s example and reveal its clients — including the Greek government — it could mark a pivotal moment in the unfolding surveillance scandal
