The exposure of an Israeli cyber-espionage campaign using online advertisements against journalists and international institutions reveals dangerous dimensions of exported repression technology.
According to Atlas Diplomacy, an opinion piece titled "Threatening Global Security With Israel's New Generation of Ad-Based Spyware" by Richard Silverstein has been published in The New Arab. Citing a Citizen Lab report on the "Adfection" espionage campaign, the piece examines how companies linked to Israeli military intelligence weaponized digital advertising networks to infiltrate the devices of journalists and security agencies across 23 countries. A summary of the piece follows below.
A new report by the digital security watchdog Citizen Lab has uncovered a sweeping cyber-espionage campaign named "Adfection" that targeted the computers of 45 Al Jazeera journalists. The operation deployed "zero-click" spyware developed by the Israeli firm Candiru, embedding malware inside ordinary web page advertisements. Once the ad is displayed, the device is infected without the user needing to click a link or download a file, granting attackers access to virtually all user activity, including emails, messages, audio, video, and physical location.
The operation relied on collaboration between two Israeli companies: Candiru, which wrote the malicious code, and Discover-Tech, which posed as a legitimate advertising firm while using its "Controlium" platform to strip users' anonymity even when encryption or VPNs were active. By placing 4 billion ad bids across 200,000 Android and Apple apps and various websites, Discover-Tech covertly directed millions of devices to Candiru's servers and targeted users in 23 countries worldwide.
The scope of targets extended far beyond media outlets to include defense, security, intelligence, and foreign policy institutions—among them NATO, the Pentagon, the International Criminal Court (ICC), the European Parliament, and even Israel's own foreign, defense, and police ministries. Founded in Herzliya in 2014, Candiru has repeatedly changed its name to evade U.S. sanctions and accountability, currently operating under the name "Integrity Labs" and claiming to be based in Hong Kong to maintain a corporate buffer for its ongoing surveillance operations.
Although Citizen Lab did not formally name the government directing the project, the concentration of targets in the Middle East and Europe and Tel Aviv's direct interest in spying on the ICC, the Pentagon, and Al Jazeera point directly to the Israeli military's signals intelligence branch, Unit 8200. Israel has turned the occupied Palestinian territories into a field laboratory for mass surveillance, facial recognition, and lethal AI technologies—including systems like "Lavender," which assigns a 1-to-100 kill score to all 2.5 million residents of Gaza, as well as tools like "Ha'bsorah" and "Where's Daddy" that have led to the killing of thousands of Palestinians.
Many leading global spyware firms—such as NSO Group, Candiru, Intellexa, Cellebrite, and Paragon—were founded by Unit 8200 veterans and export their tools to the world's most repressive regimes to be used against human rights activists, lawyers, and journalists. With the United Nations and international bodies unable or unwilling to enforce regulations against these cyber weapons, the proliferation of Israeli surveillance technology has become a direct threat to security, justice, and human rights worldwide./ Source
