Over the past few weeks, two revelations have shocked the cyber world. Both involved Israeli companies engaged in dirty ops on behalf of shady client states.

The most prominent was the discovery that NSO Group, which I’ve written about regularly here and at the Nation, devised a hack that permitted it to intercept conversations conducted via WhatsApp. The target/victim was a lawyer who is pursuing a legal case against NSO Group in Israeli courts.

The lawyer turned to Citizens Lab, which has exposed NSO’s hacking of the electronic devices of human rights activists, lawyers, journalists, and teachers around the world. As Citizens Lab began to investigate the victim’s phone, WhatsApp engineers too began noticing abnormalities in their voice-calling feature, then began warning human rights organizations that they were the targets, which likely became clear in the process of their forensic investigation.