In 2016, the New York Times published a piece detailing how much Israeli company NSO Group would charge for its spyware Pegasus: a $500,000 installation fee, and $650,000 to spy on 10 iPhones or 10 Androids.
In 2018, a Qatari citizen and Mexican journalists and activists targeted using Pegasus sued NSO Group in Cyprus and in Israel, accusing the company of actively participating in illegal spying. According to the Associated Press, their lawyers were targeted by Black Cube (NSO Group co-founder Shalev Hulio later acknowledged to The New Yorker that “there was one involvement of Black Cube” for the lawsuit in Cyprus but denied NSO Group had hired Black Cube for other lawsuits).
In the aftermath of the publication of the Pegasus Project in July 2021, and according to unnamed sources cited by several Israeli media outlets, the Israeli government set up a task force to manage the fallout of the revelations. NSO Group denied all allegations from the project and said Pegasus was being used legally. On July 22, the Israeli parliament announced it would set up an inquiry commission to investigate the allegations of misuse of Pegasus. On July 25, French president Emmanuel Macron, who was listed as a potential target by clients of NSO Group, asked Israel to investigate the Pegasus revelations. On July 28, Israeli defense officials visited NSO's offices as part of a government investigation into the company's actions. On July 29, according to an employee’s testimony to NPR, NSO Group temporarily blocked several government clients as the company investigated possible misuse.
In November 2021, four months after the Pegasus Project, rights organization Front Line Defenders found that the phones of six Palestinian human rights defenders had been infected with Pegasus. Front Line Defenders, Amnesty International and Citizen Lab, who peer-reviewed the work, said they were unable to identify with certainty the identity of the client who ordered the infection of the phones. The organizations noted, however, that four of the six identified victims were affiliated with Palestinian NGOs that were labeled "terrorist" organizations by the state of Israel shortly after their phones were infected and days before the report was published, and that Israel’s designation of the organizations as “terrorist” had been widely criticized by the international community.
The same month, the U.S. administration blacklisted NSO Group. The same month, human rights organization Front Line Defenders reported that the phones of 6 Palestinian human rights defenders had been hacked with Pegasus, the new CEO of NSO Group resigns just 12 days after his nomination was announced and Moody's downgraded NSO Group’s credit rating to “poor,” deeming that the company was at a very high risk of breaching its debt agreement. Israel’s defense ministry also released a new, shortened list of countries to which Israeli firms are allowed to export cybersecurity tools, reducing it from 102 countries to 37.
In early December, NSO Group announced it had opened an investigation after The New York Times reported Pegasus was used to spy on US diplomats in Uganda.
In January 2022, Israeli newspaper Calcalist reported that the Israeli police had allegedly used Pegasus without judicial supervision or legal permission to spy on mayors, former government employees and leaders of protests against former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Following the revelations, Israeli legislators called for a parliamentary investigation, Israel’s ministry of public security and then-Prime Minister Naftali Bennett pledged an investigation and the State Comptroller of Israel said he would expand his ongoing investigation into the use of surveillance technology by law enforcement to include the latest Pegasus allegations. A week after the Calcalist revelations, the chairman of NSO Group stepped down from his position but said his departure was planned months ago and was unrelated to the scandal.
That same month, Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed that NSO Group was in negotiations to sell the company to a US venture capital firm in the aftermath of being blacklisted by the US administration. The New York Times also disclosed that the state of Israel provided a Pegasus license to Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates during the negotiation process of the Abraham Accords, a 2020 diplomatic pact to normalize relations between Israel and the Arab countries.
On February 7, Calcalist reported that the Israeli police allegedly had used Pegasus without a warrant against a former editor-in-chief of Israeli news outlet Walla, Walla journalists, chief executives, activists, political advisers and Netanyahu’s son Avner Netanyahu, among others. (Calcalist's revelations were denied by NSO Group, which sued the newspaper. Members of the Israeli government, such as Justice Minister Gideon Sa'ar, also contended the Calcalist findings and, according to an interim report, found "no indication" of hacking using Pegasus. Calcalist's revelations were also criticized by the Israeli media, which noted the lack of clear evidence provided by the business newspaper. Calcalist later said it stood by its revelations, while admitting that there may have been mistakes regarding the spyware’s victims.)
In the aftermath of Calcalist’s reports, Israel announced it would investigate its police force’s alleged use of Pegasus. A couple of days later, thousands of people gathered in Tel Aviv to demand the establishment of an inquiry commission into the allegations that the police illegally spied on witnesses in the trial of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanhayu.
In August 2022, a Justice Ministry report on the use of spyware by the Israeli police found that the latter had acted largely in accordance with the law and that it had not hacked the phones of most names included in the list published by Calcalist, but that it had repeatedly exceeded the bounds of cyber warrants. Haaretz reported on a Pegasus spyware prototype that the Israeli Police had planned to present to security officials already in 2014. Later that month, CEO and co-founder of NSO Group Shalev Hulio announced he was stepping down. The company laid off 100 of its 700 employees and it said it would focus on sales to NATO-member countries.
In early 2023, media outlets reported that the management of five Luxembourg-based firms linked to NSO Group had been moved to London and that co-founder Omri Lavie had emerged as majority owner via a new Luxembourg-based holding company, Dufresne Holdings.
In April 2023, Citizen Lab wrote it had identified three Pegasus three Pegasus "exploits" (exploit codes that take advantage of vulnerabilities in the system) deployed in 2022 against civil society targets, suggesting the spyware was still being used by NSO customers in 2022. The laboratory also documented cases where Apple’s Lockdown Mode had successfully protected someone from a targeted attack. The same month, a Knesset committee announced it would set a subcommittee to probe the use of NSO spyware by the Israeli police.
In May 2023, Haaretz revealed that the iPhone of an Israeli political activist was hacked twice with Pegasus in two years according to two independent forensic analyses that the news outlet saw - the first forensically confirmed case of Pegasus on an Israeli citizen’s phone.
In June 2023, the Israeli ombudsman for complaints against the prosecution upheld a complaint against the attorney general of Israel for alleged delays in opening a criminal investigation against NSO Group, after Hungarian victims of cyber-attacks and a human rights NGO filed a complaint in January 2022. In a hearing with the Knesset subcommittee, the head of the state prosecutor’s cyber department said that his unit would be “obliged” to reexamine all cases involving NSO’s spyware. The Guardian reported that Hollywood producer Robert Simonds and chewing gum heir William “Beau” Wrigley considered acquiring assets of NSO Group. The White House warned that an attempted takeover of the Israeli firm by American buyers could prompt a review of whether the acquisition posed a counterintelligence threat to the U.S.