This was utterly surprising to me; I assumed this was possible, but not nearly as specific and detailed as this reveals, via 60 Minutes:

“Tonight we’ll take you inside the growing, shadowy global market of cyber-espionage. We looked specifically at a controversial Israeli company called the NSO Group, valued at nearly a billion dollars, that says it developed a hacking tool that can break into just about any smartphone on earth.

As we first reported in March, NSO licenses this software, called Pegasus, to intelligence and law enforcement agencies worldwide, so they can infiltrate the encrypted phones and apps of criminals and terrorists. Problem is, this same tool can also be deployed by a government to crush dissent. And so it is that Pegasus has been linked to human rights abuses, unethical surveillance, and even to the notoriously brutal murder of the Saudi Arabian critic Jamal Khashoggi.

Headquartered in the Israeli city of Herzliya, NSO Group operates in strict secrecy. But co-founder and CEO, Shalev Hulio, has been forced out of the shadows and not into a good light, accused of selling Pegasus to Saudi Arabia despite its abysmal record on human rights.” 

CEO of Israeli Spyware-Maker NSO on Fighting Terror, Khashoggi Murder, and Saudi Arabia

Click for video.

Source: CBS