A European court has sided with a Russian petitioner who challenged a Kremlin rule that requires telecom firms to backdoor their servers for law enforcement data
On Monday, the tech firms, as well as the Washington-based Internet Association, filed a brief supporting Facebook’s lawsuit seeking damages and an injunction, stating that the spyware tools NSO Group sells are powerful and dangerous. Foreign governments may use the technology in problematic ways, but beyond that, idiosyncratic misuse is a much greater systemic risk, the companies say in their brief. Widespread creation and deployment of these tools by private companies acting for profit dramatically increases the risk that these vulnerabilities will be obtained and exploited by malicious actors other than the initial.
In a separate statement, Microsoft notes that, by filing the brief, the tech companies are looking to protect their customers and trying to prevent the proliferation of offensive cyber weapons for malicious purposes.