Facebook Trashes Accounts Of Vast Spies-For-Hire

Cybersecurity researchers from Facebook and a university have exposed a vast network of activity from surveillance-for-hire firms from India to Israel that they claim has used hacking tools and hundreds of fake personas to monitor journalists, dissidents and politicians around the world, Sean Lyngaas reported for CNN.

Photo Insert: Facebook Headquarters, Menlo Park

As part of the investigation, Facebook parent firm Meta took down hundreds of Facebook and Instagram accounts tied to the seven different spy organizations, which included Black Cube, the intelligence firm that disgraced media mogul Harvey Weinstein allegedly hired to track actresses and journalists, according to reporting from the New Yorker.

Meta said it notified around 50,000 people that had been targeted in one way or another by the spying-for-hire firms.

The investigations from Meta and the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab offer two of the more comprehensive looks yet into a booming private spy business that the Biden administration has tried to crack down on out of concern for human rights.

Citizen Lab, a digital rights research center at the University of Toronto, discovered invasive spyware allegedly built by one of the surveillance firms, Cytrox, on the phone of former Egyptian presidential candidate Ayman Nour, a critic of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.

"While these 'cyber mercenaries' often claim that their services only target criminals and terrorists, our months-long investigation concluded that the targeting is in fact indiscriminate," and includes critics of authoritarian regimes and human rights activists, Meta researchers said in a report published Thursday.

The seven surveillance firms and organizations that Meta investigated offer clients a range of services, from easy-to-use hacking tools for infiltrating mobile phones, to access to social media accounts to monitor targets.

Black Cube's services involved posing as film producers, graduate students, and non-government organization (NGO) workers in an effort to surveil targets around the world. Another Israeli firm, Bluehawk CI, used social media accounts to pose as journalists for Fox News and other news outlets in an effort to trick their targets into being interviewed on camera, according to Meta.

The company said it disabled Facebook and Instagram accounts tied to Israeli firms Cobwebs Technologies and Cognyte, Indian firm BellTroX and an entity in China that Meta did not identify. BellTroX could not be reached for comment. None of the four other named surveillance firms responded to CNN's requests for comment.

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