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- Cobwebs Technologies, an Israeli company with offices and customers in the United States, closed 200 accounts that collected information about targets and performed social engineering to disclose private information. According to investigators, the company was used by law enforcement agencies and was also used to target activists, opposition politicians and government officials in Mexico and Hong Kong. Cobwebs spokesperson Meital Levi Tal told MIT Technology Review that the company was unaware of Meta’s findings and “only operates in accordance with the law and complies with strict privacy protection standards.”
- According to reports, the Israeli company Cognyte lost 100 accounts that were involved in surveillance of targets including journalists and politicians around the world.
- Black Cube is an Israeli company involved in numerous scandals, including a history of espionage against journalists. Facebook investigators said they found that the company had collected intelligence on a large number of targets, from Palestinian militants to people in the medical and energy industries to academics, especially in Russia. According to reports, Black Cube has established false characters including students, human rights workers and film producers. Investigators said that the company usually becomes friends with someone and then makes a phone call to obtain the target’s email address. The goal may be to implement tactics such as phishing attacks. When contacted for comment, the company denied any hacking operations and insisted that all “agents’ activities are in full compliance with local laws.”
- Another Israeli company, Bluehawk CI, is known for impersonating reporters and tricking targets into installing malware. Facebook stated that it deleted 100 accounts associated with the company, which the company believes are widely used to combat targets, including political opponents of the United Arab Emirates government and businessmen in the Middle East.
- The Indian company BellTroX has been active in the surveillance industry for at least seven years. Facebook deleted 400 accounts related to the company. Investigators said that these accounts were used to impersonate politicians and journalists, and to carry out phishing attacks on victims, including doctors, lawyers, and activists in Angola, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, and Iceland. Home and clergy.
- Investigators say that Cytrox, a North Macedonian company, is mainly engaged in hacking activities. The company’s targets are journalists and politicians around the world. Cytrox is part of a consortium of surveillance and intelligence companies called Intellexa. Earlier this year, an executive from another Intellexa company, Nexa Technologies, was indicted for allegedly spying and torturing dissidents in Libya and Egypt.
- Finally, an unidentified group in China is involved in a large-scale surveillance operation, which includes the use of social engineering and the development of malicious software against targets to monitor ethnic minorities in Xinjiang, China, Myanmar and Hong Kong.
Facebook’s parent company, Meta, sued the Israeli hacker company NSO Group in 2019. The company today sent cease and termination letters to each company and shared alerts with the approximately 50,000 victims it identified. The alert tells the victim that “a seasoned actor might target your Facebook account” and then recommends measures to better protect their account, including privacy checks.
Investigators said that the ultimate goal of this work is to spark a larger discussion about monitoring the rental industry. They stated that they recommend strengthening transparency and “know your customer” laws, deepening industry cooperation to resist surveillance companies, and passing new legislation and export control laws to increase accountability.
Investigators added that not all companies’ work seems to violate known laws and ethical standards—it is well known that some of these companies use Facebook and Instagram to carry out legal law enforcement and intelligence work. However, both platforms have established law enforcement channels to legally request data in a manner that complies with due process and transparency.
“The goals we see from these companies are not the case,” Gleicher said. “This is indiscriminately targeting the entire society. These companies aim to conceal who their customers are. If you are a foreign government and want to make it difficult for defenders to find you, you will hire such a company. Create a layer of confusion between the injuries.”
In addition to stopping and terminating letters and extensively deleting accounts, Gleicher does not rule out the possibility of future lawsuits against any violating company. Nonetheless, investigators said that finding rental surveillance activities may be an ongoing challenge.
“When we see the Internet participating in such activities, we will take an online approach,” said David Agranovich, Facebook’s director of threat interruptions. “We canceled all their activities on the platform at the same time. And know that they are adversarial networks, and then we will try to keep them away from our platform.”
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