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The Citizen Lab is an interdisciplinary laboratory based at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, Canada. It was founded by Ronald Deibert in 2001. The laboratory studies information controls that impact the openness and security of the Internet and that pose threats to human rights. The organization uses a "mixed methods" approach which combines computer-generated interrogation, data mining, and analysis with intensive field research, qualitative social science, and legal and policy analysis methods. The organization has played a major role in providing technical support to journalists investigating the use of NSO Group's Pegasus spyware on journalists, politicians and human rights advocates.
Juliette N. Kayyem is an American former government official and author. She is host of the WGBH podcast The SCIF. She is a national security analyst for CNN and is a weekly guest on Boston Public Radio. She is the Belfer Lecturer in International Security at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Pacific Council on International Policy. She is a former candidate for Governor of Massachusetts and a former Boston Globe columnist, writing about issues of national security and foreign affairs for the op-ed page.
Cellebrite DI Ltd. is an Israeli digital intelligence company that provides tools for federal, state, and local law enforcement as well as enterprise companies and service providers to collect, review, analyze and manage digital data. On April 8, 2021, Cellebrite announced plans to go public via a merger with a blank-check firm, valuing the company at approximately $2.4 billion. Their flagship product series is the Cellebrite UFED.
FinFisher, also known as FinSpy, is surveillance software marketed by Lench IT Solutions plc, which markets the spyware through law enforcement channels.
The Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO), now Computer Network Operations, and structured as S32, is a cyber-warfare intelligence-gathering unit of the National Security Agency (NSA). It has been active since at least 1998, possibly 1997, but was not named or structured as TAO until "the last days of 2000," according to General Michael Hayden.
HackingTeam was a Milan-based information technology company that sold offensive intrusion and surveillance capabilities to governments, law enforcement agencies and corporations. Its "Remote Control Systems" enable governments and corporations to monitor the communications of internet users, decipher their encrypted files and emails, record Skype and other Voice over IP communications, and remotely activate microphones and camera on target computers. The company has been criticized for providing these capabilities to governments with poor human rights records, though HackingTeam states that they have the ability to disable their software if it is used unethically. The Italian government has restricted their licence to do business with countries outside Europe.
The cyber-arms industry are the markets and associated events surrounding the sale of software exploits, zero-days, cyberweaponry, surveillance technologies, and related tools for perpetrating cyberattacks. The term may extend to both grey and black markets online and offline.
NSO Group Technologies is an Israeli cyber-intelligence firm primarily known for its proprietary spyware Pegasus, which is capable of remote zero-click surveillance of smartphones. It employed almost 500 people as of 2017.
Pegasus is a spyware developed by the Israeli cyber-arms company NSO Group that is designed to be covertly and remotely installed on mobile phones running iOS and Android. While NSO Group markets Pegasus as a product for fighting crime and terrorism, governments around the world have routinely used the spyware to surveil journalists, lawyers, political dissidents, and human rights activists.
Rocket Kitten or the Rocket Kitten Group is a hacker group thought to be linked to the Iranian government. The threat actor group has targeted organizations and individuals in the Middle East, particularly Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran as well as the United States and Europe.
Saud bin Abdullah al-Qahtani is a Saudi Arabian consultant and former royal court advisor. Prior to his dismissal in late 2018, he worked as an advisor to King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and crown prince Mohammed bin Salman.
DarkMatter Group is a computer security company founded in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in 2014 or 2015. The company describes itself as a purely defensive company.
On October 30, 2019, WhatsApp's parent company Facebook, Inc. confirmed that Pegasus, a sophisticated snooping software developed by Israel's NSO Group, was used to target Indian journalists, activists, lawyers and senior government officials. The journalists and activists are believed to have been targets of surveillance for a two-week period until May, when the Indian national election was held.
In January 2020, the FTI Consulting company claimed that in May 2018 with "medium to high confidence" the phone of Jeff Bezos had been hacked by a file sent from the WhatsApp account of the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammed bin Salman. The Saudi Arabian embassy to the United States has denied the allegations. Billionaire Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post newspaper and founder of the company Amazon, engaged FTI Consulting in February 2019 after the National Enquirer in January 2019 reported details of Bezos's affair. FTI Consulting did not link the National Enquirer to the hack.
The Pegasus Project is an international investigative journalism initiative that revealed governments' espionage on journalists, opposition politicians, activists, business people and others using the private Pegasus spyware developed by the Israeli technology and cyber-arms company NSO Group. Pegasus is ostensibly marketed for surveillance of "serious crimes and terrorism". In 2020, a target list of 50,000 phone numbers leaked to Forbidden Stories, and an analysis revealed the list contained the numbers of leading opposition politicians, human rights activists, journalists, lawyers and other political dissidents.
Candiru is a Tel Aviv-based technology company offering surveillance and cyberespionage technology to governmental clients.
In India, the Pegasus Project investigations alleged that the Pegasus spyware was used on ministers, opposition leaders, political strategist and tacticians, journalists, activists, minority leaders, Supreme court judges, religious leaders, administrators like Election Commissioners and heads of Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). Some of these phones were later analysed and were confirmed to have been targeted by the Pegasus spyware.
FORCEDENTRY, also capitalized as ForcedEntry, is a security exploit allegedly developed by NSO Group to deploy their Pegasus spyware. It enables the "zero-click" exploit that is prevalent in iOS 13 and below, but also compromises recent safeguards set by Apple's "BlastDoor" in iOS 14 and later. In September 2021, Apple released new versions of its operating systems for multiple device families containing a fix for the vulnerability.
Tamer Almisshal is a Palestinian journalist. He currently works for Al Jazeera, and is the host of the programme The Hidden is More Immense.
Cytrox is a company established in 2017 that makes malware used for cyberattacks and covert surveillance. Its Predator spyware was used to target Egyptian politician Ayman Nour in 2021 and to spy on 92 phones belonging to businessmen, journalists, politicians, government ministers and their associates in Greece. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Commerce added the Cytrox companies Cytrox AD in North Macedonia, and Cytrox Holdings Crt in Hungary to its Entity List.
References
- ↑ "NSO rival Quadream in talks with Moroccan gov't". Globes. 2021-10-08. Retrieved 2022-02-03.
- 1 2 3 4 "Secretive Israeli Cyber Firm Selling Spy-tech to Saudi Arabia". Haaretz. Retrieved 2022-02-03.
- 1 2 How Democracies Spy on Their Citizens; By Ronan Farrow, April 18, 2022, The New Yorker
- 1 2 "Israeli spyware company QuaDream expected to close down - report". Jerusalem Post. April 17, 2023.
- ↑ Bing, Christopher; Satter, Raphael (2022-02-03). "EXCLUSIVE iPhone flaw exploited by second Israeli spy firm-sources". Reuters. Retrieved 2022-02-03.
- ↑ Abu Sneineh, Mustafa. "Saudi Arabia deploys new Israeli spyware to hack activists' phones: Report". Middle East Eye. Retrieved 2022-02-03.
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