Meta said Monday that it caught a spearphishing campaign linked to spyware maker NSO Group despite a court injunction, prompting the tech giant to file a contempt-of-court complaint.

The company won a civil case last year against NSO Group barring it from targeting WhatsApp users and securing $168 million in damages, although NSO Group has been appealing the ruling.

But Meta says NSO Group, makers of the Pegasus spyware, isn’t honoring the permanent injunction.

“We successfully disrupted NSO-linked social engineering attempts, after investigating user reports,” it said in a blog post. “They tried to trick people into clicking on malicious links to drive them to external websites outside of WhatsApp, similar to previously reported 1-click phishing campaigns linked to NSO. We also caught them creating test accounts and groups on WhatsApp, which we took down.”

Meta said the campaign resembled spyware infections that hit journalists and activists in Jordan from 2019 to 2023.

NSO Group didn’t respond to requests for comment about Meta’s accusations.

One top researcher who tracks spyware said NSO Group’s actions are an argument for keeping them on the U.S. sanctions “entity” list that the company has fought to be removed from since its designation in 2021.

“NSO’s own actions make the strongest argument for why they should stay on the Entity list,” John Scott-Railton, senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, wrote on social media. “And reaffirm that the decision to put them there was the right one.”

Meta made the same argument.

“When a malicious company on the US government’s Entity List continues to defy US courts, existing restrictions must remain firmly in place,” it said in its blog post. “Easing them would undermine US national security and put American companies and billions of people worldwide who depend on secure communications at risk.”

Lawmakers have sought information on the federal government’s prospective use of NSO Group tech and other kinds of spyware, despite a blacklist, given close ties between the company’s new executive chairman and President Donald Trump.

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The Meta-owned communications app is filing a federal court contempt order against NSO.

The post WhatsApp Catches Spyware Firm NSO Defying No-Hacking Court Order appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Google launched a feature for Android phones Tuesday for dedicated forensic logs about intrusions from sophisticated attacks like those by spyware vendors, in what design partners at Amnesty International hailed as an important first.

The tech giant has been ramping up the new feature, Intrusion Logging, since last year, and has now begun rolling it out.

“The new intrusion logging feature promises to be a major aid to digital forensics researchers undertaking investigations into sophisticated attacks on Android devices,” Amnesty International said in a Tuesday technical briefing. “This is the first time a major device vendor has released a feature specifically to enhance the ability to forensically detect and respond to advanced digital threats.”

To date, independent investigators have relied on records and often short-lived log files that weren’t meant for forensic use, and Amnesty said surveillance groups have grown increasingly aware of those forensic efforts. Intrusion Logging, a feature of Android Advanced Protection Mode, is designed specifically to keep track of possible intrusions for forensic purposes. It keeps records of security incidents like device unlocking, physical access and spyware installation and removal.

Google’s annual security and privacy update for Android phones mentions the feature and its development with Amnesty International, Reporters Without Borders and others. It also touts new protections against banking scam calls, other features for detecting suspicious activity on Android phones, additional privacy safeguards and more.

The firm has been working on the feature since announcing it last year.

“Intrusion Logging enables persistent and privacy-preserving forensics logging to allow for investigation of devices in the event of a suspected compromise,” wrote Eugene Liderman, director of Android security and privacy.

Intrusion Logging joins an expanding slate of features from tech companies to fight sophisticated attacks like those from commercial spyware, among them Apple’s Lockdown Mode and Memory Integrity Enforcement and WhatsApp’s Strict Account Settings.

Intrusion Logging “promises to help shift the balance to the advantage of defenders, providing civil society investigators with the key evidence needed to detect and expose some of the most advanced attacks facing journalists and activists,” said Donncha Ó Cearbhaill, head of the Amnesty International Security Lab, “With Intrusion Logging Google is the first major vendor to proactively address to challenge of detecting advanced attacks on device. By making more consensual forensic data available for researchers, we can make life more difficult for attackers and help civil society seek accountability when their devices are unlawfully targeted by spyware and mobile data extraction tools.”

The feature has some limitations, though, Amnesty said in its technical briefing. It requires Android 16 and is only available for now on Pixel devices; the device has to be linked to a Google account, and the logs may include sensitive information, like browser navigation history, so secure sharing of the logs is important.

The logs may also be deletable by attackers, Ó Cearbhaill told CyberScoop, but he said he understands there are plans to strengthen protections against that in future versions. And lots of attacks would be detectable in the logs where attackers wouldn’t necessarily have the root access needed to try to delete logs, he said.

To enable Intrusion Logging, users need to be using Android Advanced Protection Mode, and can find the feature at Settings > Security & privacy > Advanced Protection > Intrusion Logging. If users suspect some kind of security incident, they’ll need to export and share the logs with a forensic analyst.

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The vulnerabilities were reported to Meta through its bug bounty program and were patched with updates released earlier this year.

The post WhatsApp Discloses File Spoofing, Arbitrary URL Scheme Vulnerabilities appeared first on SecurityWeek.

Russian intelligence-affiliated hackers have gained access to thousands of users’ messaging apps with a global phishing campaign, the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned in a public service announcement on Friday.

The high-value targets they’re pursuing include current and former U.S. government officials, political figures, military personnel and journalists, the two agencies said in the joint PSA about the hackers’ attempts to infiltrate commercial messaging applications (CMAs).

The U.S. alert comes on the heels of an earlier warning from Dutch authorities, who said last week that Russian hackers were “engaged in a large-scale global attempt” to take over WhatsApp and Signal accounts. The Dutch warning likewise followed a similar warning from Germany in February.

The U.S. agencies emphasized that the hackers had not been able to bypass end-to-end encryption, instead manipulating users into giving up access. The scheme involves hackers posing as Signal help personnel, then inviting them to click a link or provide verification codes or account personal identification number.

“After compromising an account, malicious actors can view the victims’ messages and contact lists, send messages, and conduct additional phishing against other CMA accounts,” the PSA explains. “(Note: reporting shows that the threat actors specifically target Signal accounts but can apply similar methods against other CMAs).”

However, “CMA users who strengthen their personal cybersecurity and defend against social engineering attempts can reduce the risk of account compromise and limit the effectiveness of the threat actors’ current tactics, techniques, and procedures,” the agencies said.

The Russian campaign is just the latest to seek to bypass the protections commercial messaging apps offer. CISA in November warned about spyware targeting of messaging apps. 

There sometimes has been a Russian intelligence nexus to the recent targeting. Google Threat Intelligence Group shined a spotlight last year on Russian attempts to target Signal users in Ukraine.

‘We anticipate the tactics and methods used to target Signal will grow in prevalence in the near-term and proliferate to additional threat actors and regions outside the Ukrainian theater of war,” the company said.

The post FBI, CISA issue PSA on Russian intelligence campaign to target messaging apps appeared first on CyberScoop.

Microsoft Corp. today issued security updates to fix more than 80 vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and software. There are no known “zero-day” or actively exploited vulnerabilities in this month’s bundle from Redmond, which nevertheless includes patches for 13 flaws that earned Microsoft’s most-dire “critical” label. Meanwhile, both Apple and Google recently released updates to fix zero-day bugs in their devices.

Microsoft assigns security flaws a “critical” rating when malware or miscreants can exploit them to gain remote access to a Windows system with little or no help from users. Among the more concerning critical bugs quashed this month is CVE-2025-54918. The problem here resides with Windows NTLM, or NT LAN Manager, a suite of code for managing authentication in a Windows network environment.

Redmond rates this flaw as “Exploitation More Likely,” and although it is listed as a privilege escalation vulnerability, Kev Breen at Immersive says this one is actually exploitable over the network or the Internet.

“From Microsoft’s limited description, it appears that if an attacker is able to send specially crafted packets over the network to the target device, they would have the ability to gain SYSTEM-level privileges on the target machine,” Breen said. “The patch notes for this vulnerability state that ‘Improper authentication in Windows NTLM allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges over a network,’ suggesting an attacker may already need to have access to the NTLM hash or the user’s credentials.”

Breen said another patch — CVE-2025-55234, a 8.8 CVSS-scored flaw affecting the Windows SMB client for sharing files across a network — also is listed as privilege escalation bug but is likewise remotely exploitable. This vulnerability was publicly disclosed prior to this month.

“Microsoft says that an attacker with network access would be able to perform a replay attack against a target host, which could result in the attacker gaining additional privileges, which could lead to code execution,” Breen noted.

CVE-2025-54916 is an “important” vulnerability in Windows NTFS — the default filesystem for all modern versions of Windows — that can lead to remote code execution. Microsoft likewise thinks we are more than likely to see exploitation of this bug soon: The last time Microsoft patched an NTFS bug was in March 2025 and it was already being exploited in the wild as a zero-day.

“While the title of the CVE says ‘Remote Code Execution,’ this exploit is not remotely exploitable over the network, but instead needs an attacker to either have the ability to run code on the host or to convince a user to run a file that would trigger the exploit,” Breen said. “This is commonly seen in social engineering attacks, where they send the user a file to open as an attachment or a link to a file to download and run.”

Critical and remote code execution bugs tend to steal all the limelight, but Tenable Senior Staff Research Engineer Satnam Narang notes that nearly half of all vulnerabilities fixed by Microsoft this month are privilege escalation flaws that require an attacker to have gained access to a target system first before attempting to elevate privileges.

“For the third time this year, Microsoft patched more elevation of privilege vulnerabilities than remote code execution flaws,” Narang observed.

On Sept. 3, Google fixed two flaws that were detected as exploited in zero-day attacks, including CVE-2025-38352, an elevation of privilege in the Android kernel, and CVE-2025-48543, also an elevation of privilege problem in the Android Runtime component.

Also, Apple recently patched its seventh zero-day (CVE-2025-43300) of this year. It was part of an exploit chain used along with a vulnerability in the WhatsApp (CVE-2025-55177) instant messenger to hack Apple devices. Amnesty International reports that the two zero-days have been used in “an advanced spyware campaign” over the past 90 days. The issue is fixed in iOS 18.6.2, iPadOS 18.6.2, iPadOS 17.7.10, macOS Sequoia 15.6.1, macOS Sonoma 14.7.8, and macOS Ventura 13.7.8.

The SANS Internet Storm Center has a clickable breakdown of each individual fix from Microsoft, indexed by severity and CVSS score. Enterprise Windows admins involved in testing patches before rolling them out should keep an eye on askwoody.com, which often has the skinny on wonky updates.

AskWoody also reminds us that we’re now just two months out from Microsoft discontinuing free security updates for Windows 10 computers. For those interested in safely extending the lifespan and usefulness of these older machines, check out last month’s Patch Tuesday coverage for a few pointers.

As ever, please don’t neglect to back up your data (if not your entire system) at regular intervals, and feel free to sound off in the comments if you experience problems installing any of these fixes.