The ruling is a major win for privacy advocates and those pushing back against NSO Group’s controversial Pegasus software.

A trial team led by Greg Andres, Antonio Perez-Marques and Micah Block of Davis Polk & Wardwell convinced jurors that NSO Group, the Israeli company behind the Pegasus spyware, “engaged in malice, oppression or fraud” in violation of California’s anti-hacking law,

On May 6, a California federal jury found that the Israeli spyware vendor owes $167.254 million in punitive damages for hacking into about 1400 WhatsApp users' devices. It will also have to pay $444,719 in compensatory damages to Meta, the owner of WhatsApp.