New Delhi, June 9 -- Meta has asked a US federal court to hold Israeli spyware company NSO Group in contempt, alleging that the firm allowed its Pegasus surveillance technology to be deployed against WhatsApp users through a spear-phishing campaign that it says directly violates a judicial order issued last year expressly prohibiting such activity.

The contempt motion, announced via a Meta blog post on Monday, follows the detection of malicious links on the messaging platform that the company has attributed to NSO Group's technology.

The Israeli spyware firm NSO shared links were designed to redirect users to websites operating outside of WhatsApp, according to a company spokesperson, in what security researchers describe as a spear-phi...