The company NSO Group that develops Pegasus tracking software has a very difficult road ahead of it. The US Department of Commerce has added NSO to its blacklist of companies, which effectively bans any commercial transactions.
The move prohibits US companies from doing business with the NSO unless expressly permitted. But this is unlikely, since the same law does not allow exceptions.
The NSO and the Israeli company Candiru (also blacklisted) are facing charges for allowing and facilitating espionage by authoritarian governments.
It is alleged that they provided monitoring software such as Pegasus NSO to "authoritarian governments" who used it to monitor activists, journalists and other critics in an effort to crush any political disagreement.
The latest round of trade bans announced by the ministry also affects Russian company Positive Technologies and Singapore-based Computer Security Initiative Consultancy, which have been accused of trading hacking tools.
The Commerce Department claims that it has evidence of NSO's actions, which is not encouraging for the company's future. Remember what happened to her Huawei, who is also a member of the blacklist. The company may not have closed, but it is difficult to operate without the support of the US market.
A representative of her NSO He told Engadget that the company was "disappointed" with the decision and claimed that its tools had helped the United States "prevent terrorism and crime". The NSO said it would seek the repeal of the ban and reiterated that it complied with the "strictest" human rights standards in the world.
