Meta alerted around 50,000 users about targeting by ‘surveillance-for-hire’ companies. The users include journalists and activists across 100 different nations.
Meta alerts users about targeted spying
Meta, facebook’s parent company alerted 50,000 of its users that commercial ‘surveillance-for-hire’ firms were spying on their accounts. The firm also put up a blog post explaining how they are taking action against this. Several journalists, human rights activists, dissidents, opposition families, and critics of authoritarian regimes were under target. The matter unraveled in a long investigation where Meta was identifying spying groups and removed them.
The platform also released a detailed report on the treat, naming six of the seven firms. Four firms among them are based in Israel and three others in India, China, and North Macedonia. However, one of them is still unknown. Black Cube, based in Israel is a “litigation support firm”. Black Cube, previously employed by Harvey Weinstein for blocking a New York Times article that flared the #MeToo movement. Additionally, the report also referenced the NSO Group which developed a “zero-click” exploit for hacking phones with a message.
Updates and experts’ opinions:
“These companies are part of a sprawling industry that provides intrusive software tools and surveillance services indiscriminately to any customer-regardless of who they target or the human rights abuses they might enable,” stated David Agranovich and Mike Dvilyanski. Agranovichis the director of the platform’s threat disruption and Dvilyanski the head of the cyber espionage investigation.“This industry ‘democratizes’ these threats, making them available to government and non-government groups that otherwise wouldn’t have these capabilities,” they added.
“The disclosure by Facebook of actions it has taken to disrupt and remove seven private firms selling surveillance services to regimes that abuse human rights makes it abundantly clear that more must be done to stop this mercenary marketplace,” stated Congressman Adam Schiff. “By enabling indiscriminate surveillance against journalists and political dissidents. Among others, these companies pose a clear threat to human rights,” added the congressman.