globally to a tonne of bad actors.
Here is a very long article with a tonne of detail.
The Full Story behind the NSO Hack: The Israeli-Military-Allied Surveillance Industry and Transnational Repression
https://arabcenterdc.org/resource/the-full-story-behind-the-nso-hack-the-israeli-military-allied-surveillance-industry-and-transnational-repression/
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More than NSO: The Israeli Cyber-Surveillance Industry
The media outrage involving the NSO Group and its Pegasus spyware misses the broader picture of an Israeli offensive surveillance industry encompassing hundreds, possibly thousands, of cyber companies. Several Israeli surveillance firms have been the subject of research by centers like Citizen Lab, Amnesty International’s Security Lab, and Privacy International and the Haaretz newspaper. While the NSO Group has been engulfed in scrutiny and lawsuits over the last few years, many others continue to operate in secret while some received their fair share of scandal.
The Israeli firm Black Cube drew international attention for allegedly working for the Trump Administration to discredit Obama Administration officials who helped negotiate the Iran nuclear deal, and for gathering information on behalf of client Harvey Weinstein about the women who had been sexually assaulted by him. Another company, Psy-Group, conducted social media influence and manipulation campaigns, elaborate false identities to manipulate targets, smear operations, honey traps, and secretive HUMINT (human intelligence) activities in the United states, including Project Butterfly to spy on and embarrass and intimidate Palestinian rights activists. The company shut down in 2018 following its implication in the Mueller investigation into Russian election interference for pitching psychological operations (hence the name Psy-Group) and social media manipulation campaigns to the Trump team in 2016 in order to influence election results.
A secretive Israeli company, Quadream, operates a spyware technology called Reign, which like Pegasus has zero-click capabilities to infect smartphones and gain access to all data and documents stored on the phone as well as control over the camera and microphone. However, unlike Pegasus which maintains the ability to destroy the spyware if it is being abused, Reign cannot be remotely turned off. This additional feature may be the reason why the Saudi regime has been working with Quadream since 2019, in addition to its deals with the NGO Group. Archimedes Group operates political campaigns on social media and was caught using fake accounts and spreading disinformation in order to influence and disrupt elections in various countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America. An investigation by Facebook revealed that Archimedes spent some $800,000 on fake ads between 2012 and 2019.
The Israeli company, Verint Systems, sold software to Azerbaijan and Indonesia that were used to track and arrest LGBTQ+ individuals and activists and religious minorities. Verint products were also sold to Bahrain and used for surveillance and collecting information from social media sites, and to South Sudan, Peru, and Columbia where they “were used for eavesdropping on regime opponents.” Cellebrite offers services to retrieve data deleted from devices and was used in Belarus, Hong Kong, and Russia to target pro-democracy activists including Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny. Even US schools are using Cellebrite software to unlock student phones. An NSO sister company, Circles Technologies, sold services to UAE’s Supreme Council for National Security which kept tabs on and intercepted conversations of members of the Qatari royal family, the editor of the Qatari Al Arab newspaper, and other Qatari citizens. Circles also sold capabilities to Nigerian governors ahead of the 2015 elections to monitor rivals and their family members and to arrest regime critics. Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest military company known for manufacturing weapons and technologies used in attacks against Palestinian civilians, supplied the Nigerian government with espionage programs while Cyberbit, formerly part of Nice Systems and acquired by Elbit Systems, sold spyware to Ethiopia and was used against dissidents in the United States and Britain. Candiru, which is another secretive Israel-based company that sells spyware exclusively to governments, sold remote spying software to Saudi Arabia, Hungary, and Indonesia, among others. It’s not only the Israeli companies that are involved in these digital transnational repression operations, but veterans of the Israeli Unit 8200 that focuses on military intelligence operations are also moving on to other surveillance companies around the world, employing and spreading their repressive military skills. For example, Abu Dhabi intelligence firm, DarkMatter, is known for recruiting Unit 8200 graduates and offering them high salaries and beachfront accommodations in Cyprus.
The examples are numerous and too many to list. These firms are knowingly involved in selling offensive military-grade cyber surveillance systems and weapons to non-democratic and oppressive regimes around the world for use against innocent citizens, critics, and activists. This intricate web of Israeli military-grade surveillance companies represents a worrying growing trend of Israeli intelligence firms that are self-described as “private Mossads” but are essentially connected to the Israeli military intelligence units and often intersect on many levels and work closely together.
Mossad for Hire: Industry Ties to the Israeli State Military Apparatus
Israeli spyware companies like Archimedes, Black Cube, Candiru, Carbyne, Cellebrite, Cyberbit, Elbit Systems, NSO Group, Psy-Group, Quadream, Toka, Verint, White Knight, Wikistrat, among many others, have been selling surveillance technologies around the world for years. What these companies have in common is that they are trained by the Israeli military and sanctioned by the Israeli state. The majority of their founders and personnel are graduates of Unit 8200, an intelligence unit of the Military Intelligence Directorate of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), sometime referred to as the Central Collection Unit of the Intelligence Corps or the Israeli SIGINT (signal intelligence) National Unit (ISNU). According to a study cited by Haaretz in 2018, 80 percent of the 2,300 people who founded the 700 Israeli cybersecurity companies at the time came from IDF intelligence units.
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