Apple alerted close to a dozen U.S. State Department employees whose phones were hacked by an unknown operator of NSO Group's Pegasus spyware. The hacks happened in the past few months hit U.S. officials in Uganda. It comes a week after Apple said it would sue NSO to stop it from hacking its users, and would notify victims of NSO's hacking. The Washington Post ($) matched Reuters' reporting, but added that the number of State employees hacked went up to 11, at least. The U.S. officials were targeted with a new silent zero-click exploit known as ForcedEntry, which has the capability of breaking through Apple's new toughened security protections, dubbed BlastDoor, specifically the silent attacks that require no user interaction. Last month, NSO was put on a U.S. "entity" list, which prohibits the company from receiving U.S. tech.
