Doing so would successfully freeze NSO’s belongings and pressure its largest traders, together with Novalpina Capital, a British non-public fairness agency — and its traders, which embrace Oregon’s state pension fund — to divest. It may additionally thwart NSO Group’s plans for a profitable exit, equivalent to an preliminary public providing or acquisition.

NSO was one in every of 4 corporations that had been blacklisted on Wednesday.

Candiru, one other Israeli agency, was sanctioned based mostly on proof that it equipped adware to overseas governments. Positive Technologies of Russia, which was focused with sanctions final April for its work with Russian intelligence, and Computer Security Initiative Consultancy of Singapore had been added to the record for trafficking in hacking instruments, based on the Commerce Department’s announcement.

“The United States is committed to aggressively using export controls to hold companies accountable that develop, traffic, or use technologies to conduct malicious activities that threaten the cybersecurity of members of civil society, dissidents, government officials and organizations here and abroad,” Gina Raimondo, the commerce secretary, mentioned in a press release.

NSO has mentioned it solely sells its adware to governments whose human rights data have been vetted, for the aim of countering terrorism and crime. But its adware continues to pop up on the telephones of journalists, critics of autocratic regimes, even youngsters. Some of NSO’s targets — like Ahmed Mansoor, a critic of the United Arab Emirates — have been imprisoned and held in solitary confinement for years after NSO’s spyware was found on their phones.

Apple has patched its iOS software program a number of occasions to mitigate vulnerabilities exploited by NSO’s adware.

Candiru was based by engineers who left NSO. Last July, Microsoft reported that Candiru’s adware exploited a pair of Windows vulnerabilities to focus on the telephones, computer systems, and internet-connected units of some hundred activists, journalists and dissidents throughout ten nations.

Both NSO and Candiru had been imagined to be underneath the strict management of Israel’s Ministry of Defense. But the ministry licensed the businesses to promote their merchandise to quite a lot of nations with a protracted historical past of extreme human rights violations, like Saudi Arabia, and continued to approve their sale even after the homicide of Mr. Khashoggi and the invention of adware on his associates’ telephones.