For many years, rental supervision companies have been quietly using Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp as springboards to everyone’s goal in more than 100 countries. Today, Meta has removed seven of them from its platform and is notifying more than 50,000 people that they may have been affected by the activity. Meta speak many are journalists, human rights activists, dissidents, political opponents and clerics, but others are simply ordinary people, like a participant in a lawsuit .
Meta took down multiple accounts and dismantled other infrastructure on its platform as part of the action, banning organizations and sending them outage and unsubscribe warnings. The company says it is also publicly sharing research and indicators of breaches so other security platforms and organizations can better identify similar activity. The findings underscore the breadth of targeted surveillance and the vast scope of targeting it enables worldwide.
“Cyber mercenaries often claim that their surveillance equipment and services are focused on tracking criminals and terrorists, but our investigations and similar investigations by Independent research, our industry colleagues and governments have demonstrated that the targeting is in fact indiscriminate,” Nathaniel Gleicher, Meta’s head of security policy, said during the interview. called on Thursday with reporters. “These companies… are building tools to manage fake accounts, target and survey people, allow malware to be distributed, and then make them available to any customer. Who cares most — customers who are willing to pay. That means there are more threat actors that could use these tools than there would be without the industry. “
The seven surveillance companies Meta is taking action against are Cobwebs Technologies, an Israeli web intelligence company with offices in the US, Cognyte, an Israeli company formerly known as WebintPro, Black Cube, a Israeli company. steadiness with presence in the UK and Spain, Bluehawk CI, based in Israel and with offices in the US and UK, BellTroX, based in India, Cytrox, a North Macedonian company and an unspecified corporation based in China.
Meta emphasizes that the rental surveillance industry as a whole does its job in three categories. You can think of it as the stages of a monitoring chain; Different companies have different features in that superstructure.
The first stage is “reconnaissance,” in which companies gather information about targets widely, often through automated, mass collection of the public internet and black web. The second stage is “commitment”, where operators actually approach the targets, trying to establish a relationship and build trust with them. Surveillance companies set up fake profiles and identities, say graduates or journalists, in order to gain access to targets. They may also distribute fabricated content and misinformation, all to build relationships. And the third stage is “exploit” or “hack for hire”, where actors can exploit this trust if needed to get targets for informing, clicking on malicious links, download malicious attachments or perform some other type of action.
