Israeli firm used online ads to run vast spy operation, researchers say

Israeli digital advertising agency Discover-Tech spied on internet users through a sprawling network of online ads that it used to track targets and help hack their devices, two research groups say.

Its services gave Israel’s Candiru — a spyware company blacklisted by the US government — as well as other Israeli surveillance firms access to advertising platforms run by Google, Comcast, Russia’s Yandex and others, according to separate reports from Canadian cyber watchdog group Citizen Lab and New York advertising security firm Confiant.

The reports show how the online advertising business, long a subject of privacy concerns, can also serve as a channel for sweeping espionage campaigns.

“The way online advertising works today is a systemic security threat,” Wolfie Cristl, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, tells Reuters. “For states, the private sector, civil society and everyone else alike.”

Discover-Tech’s online ads — often for ordinary products such as phones or earpods — reached more than 120,000 websites and 75,000 apps through its various partnerships, Citizen Lab says.

Users who visited sites or used apps with the malicious ads could be identified and tracked by Discover-Tech, which would sometimes also try to extract phone numbers from some smartphone users, the researchers say. Ads only needed to load on a website for the spying to occur.

Some ads would be used to help plant spyware from Candiru on users’ devices, both research groups say, though Confiant said that ads it tied to Candiru were a tiny fraction of Discover-Tech’s overall volume.

Discover-Tech, which was founded in 2020, does not return messages left via its contact form. A LinkedIn message and emails sent to its chief executive, Dekel Boni, are not returned.

Reuters’ attempts to reach Candiru’s owners are not successful. The US Commerce Department blacklisted Candiru in 2021 for allegedly supplying spyware that was used to maliciously target government officials, journalists, activists and academics.