Informed sources: Raid on Israeli-managed vessel was retaliation for Israeli raid on Syria
Press TV – July 30, 2021
Informed sources have told Al-Alam television that an attack on an Israeli-managed petroleum products tanker off the coast of Oman in the Arabian Sea that killed two crew members was in response to an Israeli missile attack on Syria that killed two resistance forces.
The Mercer Street, a Liberian-flagged, Japanese-owned ship, came under attack about 152 nautical miles (280 km) northeast of the Omani port of Duqm on Thursday, according to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO), which provides maritime security information.
In a statement on Friday, Zodiac Maritime, the Israeli-owned firm managing the oil tanker, claimed that two crewmen, a Briton and a Romanian, had been killed in the assault.
“Details of the incident are still being established and an investigation into the incident is currently underway. We continue to work closely with the UKMTO and other relevant authorities,” London-based Zodiac said on its website.
It also said it was “not aware of harm to any other personnel” than the British and Romanian crewmen who were allegedly killed.
According to Refinitiv ship tracking, the medium-size tanker was headed to Fujairah, a port and oil terminal in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), from Tanzania. Earlier on Friday, the firm described the incident as suspected piracy, but the UKMTO categorized it as not piracy-related.
The company said the vessel was now sailing under the control of its crew and on its own power to a safe location with a US naval escort.
In recent months, several other Israeli ships have come under apparent attacks on various maritime routes across the world. Earlier in the month, a fire broke out on an Israeli-owned cargo ship after it was struck by an “unidentified weapon” in the northern Indian Ocean. Lebanon’s al-Mayadeen television network said the Israeli vessel had been on route to the coast of the UAE when it was attacked.
Back in February, an Israeli-owned ship was hit by an explosion in the sea of Oman. In April, another Israeli ship came under attack off the coast of the UAE.
The attacks come against a backdrop of the Israeli regime’s various assaults on cargo ships across the Persian Gulf region and elsewhere.
Israel and Covid: Is the drug deadlier than the disease?
By Neville Hodgkinson – The Conservative Woman – July 30, 2021
ISRAEL’S nine million people, and Gibraltar’s 34,000, are among the most Covid-19 vaccinated in the world, almost entirely using the Pfizer mRNA injection. But after a fall in cases, both communities are now once again seeing a rapid rise in infections.
Sacrifices made in life and liberty are beginning to look less worthwhile – a fact that French legislators seem to have overlooked this week in requiring Covid vaccine passports for a wide range of normal life activities.
Governments and media commentators internationally praised Israelis and Gibraltarians as they did their best to support scientists and politicians trying to minimise damage wrought by SARS-COV-2, the genetically engineered virus (see here and here and here) first identified in Wuhan, China.
Less attention was given to the fact that Gibraltar suffered the highest Covid mortality rate in the world, proportional to its small population, during the first three weeks of a vaccine rollout that began on January 10 this year.
Despite the opportunity for a focused inquiry that could have shed light on the vaccine’s safety, regulators failed to look into claims that the jab itself, in the frail and elderly people who received it first, contributed to this tragic loss of life, the worst in Gibraltarians in over 100 years.
More than 78,000 doses were administered, reaching close to 100 per cent of the population, as well as some visiting tourists and workers.
Residents went along with promises that the jab would prevent a renewal of the lockdowns they suffered last year, which were hugely socially and economically damaging.
But today Gibraltar is experiencing a surge in breakthrough infections. More than 700 people are in self-isolation, and there are over 260 active Covid cases, although only seven of those are receiving treatment in hospital.
Globally, regulators have downplayed deaths and injuries associated with the Covid vaccines, insisting that the protection they offer against the disease offers the best way out of the crisis.
In Israel this week, however, the health ministry reported that 2,260 new infections were diagnosed on Tuesday alone, a high not seen since mid-March.
Across Israel there are now 14,365 confirmed cases, described as ‘skyrocketing’ by the Israeli newspaper Arutz Sheva. Of those, 258 are in hospital, 153 in a serious condition, and 35 are critically ill.
It has not been revealed how many of these cases had received the vaccine. More than five million Israelis have had both doses, but ‘vaccine hesitancy’ has grown, as news of the apparent dangers has spread, and the rate of full vaccination has slowed to a crawl.
A study by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, reported this week by The Times of Israel, indicated however a fall in the Pfizer vaccine’s effectiveness over time, with those vaccinated in January having just 16 per cent protection against infection now. Since elderly people, who respond less to the vaccine, were among the first to receive the jab, that failure is unlikely to be as great across the population as a whole.
Nevertheless, the phenomenon of so-called breakthrough infections is causing mounting concern in the scientific community.
The Israeli government has recognised the harm caused by lockdowns and to try to curb the resurgence in infections is focusing instead on mask-wearing, social quarantining, and reinstatement of a vaccine passport for events of more than 100 people in closed venues.
It has also announced a continuing programme of vaccinations, and health ministry officials met on Wednesday to decide whether a third, booster dose should be provided to all elderly people. Israel set a world precedent by administering a third shot two weeks ago to those with severely compromised immune systems.
If the world goes down the route of regular Covid jabs, as with the (largely ineffective) flu vaccine, it will be great news for Pfizer shareholders, but not for those who suffer the resulting injuries and deaths from the vaccine.
Nearly 6,500 deaths have been attributed to Covid in Israel, but one study claimed there were ‘orders of magnitude’ increases in death rates during a massive vaccination campaign beginning in mid-December.
In the two months to mid-February, 2,337 deaths occurred, leading the study authors to conclude that ‘vaccinations have caused more deaths than the coronavirus would have caused during the same period.’
The Israeli People’s Committee, a team of doctors, lawyers, and scientists of various disciplines concerned at the impact of both the vaccine drive and civil rights restrictions on ‘our people’s welfare and the destiny of our country’, has announced an inquiry into what it called ‘suspected governmental and institutional criminality’ during the crisis.
It says the state has ‘systematically shut down all monitoring and tracking systems’ designed to identify vaccine adverse events, despite the experimental nature of the product.
The result has been ‘an unprecedented flood of thousands of serious adverse event reports after the vaccine on social media, which seems to be the only forum that still allows people to share their experiences’.
The gap between this reality and information published by the Israeli ministry of health and the media, is ‘inconceivably large’, the committee says, raising concerns of ‘a dangerous deception not only of Israeli citizens, but of citizens of the entire world, who view Israel as the research laboratory of Pfizer’s corona vaccine.
‘Such a deception, whether negligent or premeditated, could create additional cycles of harm to humans around the globe.
‘We wish to say to the Israeli government and governments throughout the world: A lack of transparency kills people. Deception and concealment lead to disability and loss of life. Remove all confidentiality, create transparent and controlled reporting mechanisms; only then can lives be saved and further damage avoided from the very tool that is supposed to preserve health.
‘Is this a case where the drug is more deadly than the disease? Or is it equally, or less, deadly? We can only come to a true conclusion if comprehensive data is revealed in real time and if the press, which is supposed to be free and a watchdog of democracy, will remain on guard and raise the alarm when necessary. And it is indeed very necessary.’
Meanwhile, Pfizer has applied to US regulators for full approval of its jab, arguing that the company’s data ‘confirm the favourable efficacy and safety profile of our vaccine’.
Another Israeli Spy Story: When Will It End?
By Philip Giraldi | Strategic Culture Foundation | July 29, 2021
It is perhaps not necessary to point out how the mainstream media in the United States as well as in Europe and Oceania persist in ignoring or otherwise covering up stories that make the Israelis look bad. Recent accounts of the slaughter of children and mostly civilians in Gaza by Israeli planes, missiles and artillery consistently try to depict the conflict as warfare between two comparable opponents, ignoring the enormous disparity in the military force available to the two sides. Israel has a modern army, air force and navy while Hamas has nothing but some small arms as well as improvised rockets and incendiary balloons.
The reluctance to criticize Israeli behavior is largely attributable to the power of the Zionist lobbies in the respective countries but it is also at least in part due to the complicity of Western governments in conniving at the Jewish state’s actions in its own region. The persistence in Israeli demands for war against Iran, preferable fought by the United States, was clear again this past week when the new government in Jerusalem declared that it would be increasing its military budget in anticipation of war with the Islamic Republic. Perhaps not surprisingly, the U.S. Congress also has several bills pending that would increase military assistance to Israel by a factor of three.
Aside from their overwhelming affection for the Jewish state, politicians and talking heads in Washington have always sought to have an enemy to explain why the foreign and national security policies have been such failures. Russia was so designated during the long years of the Cold War and more recently both the White House and Congress have begun to warn that it is China that is seeking to confront democratic norms and “export its authoritarian model.”
Given all of that, there must have been shock in a number of newsrooms when it turned out that the guilty party behind an explosive spy story that was revealed recently appears to be none other than America’s “closest ally and best friend.” It seems that a private Israeli surveillance plus security firm consisting of former cyberwarfare military and intelligence officers and having close ties to the Benjamin Netanyahu government has been selling advanced spyware to at least 45 governments. The sales are in theory restricted for use only in terrorism and criminal cases, but somehow the resource has instead been routinely used against journalists, political activists, business executives, and politicians. Saudi Arabia, for example, used the spyware to track dissident journal Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered by Saudi agents in Istanbul in 2018.
And even though the software has been regularly used against U.S. government officials and journalists, it appears that the Biden Administration has been aware of its capabilities and has done nothing to stop it. In its own defense, the Israeli company NSO that developed the spyware has claimed, implausibly, that it can no longer be used to hack U.S. phones. That assertion was debunked by former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, who tweeted “NSO’s claim that it is ‘technologically impossible’ to spy on American phone numbers is a bald-faced lie: a exploit that works against Macron’s iPhone will work the same on Biden’s iPhone. Any code written to prohibit targeting a country can also be unwritten. It’s a fig leaf.”
The surprise revelation of the Israeli activity came not from a government counter-intelligence agency, but rather from a group of 17 international media organizations that formed a consortium to investigate a data leak relating to hacked telephones. The group included major news outlets that had apparently been targeted using the Pegasus hacking spyware developed by the NSO Group, which was primarily designed to penetrate the security features of smartphones. One former cybersecurity engineer from the U.S. intelligence community described Pegasus as an “eloquently nasty” tool that could be used to “spy on almost the entire world population.” The spyware “can be installed remotely on a targeted person’s smartphone without requiring them to take any action such as clicking on a link or answering a call. Once installed, it allows clients to take complete control of the device, including accessing messages from encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal, and turning on the microphone and camera.” It can also reveal the phone’s location.
The software was designed with a backdoor which allowed NSO to monitor the surveillances and it is presumed that the information was also shared with Israeli intelligence. By one estimate 50,000 smartphones were accessed worldwide, including 10 prime ministers, three presidents including Emmanuel Macron of France, a king, foreign ministers and assorted journalists and government officials both in the U.S. and elsewhere.
A more cautious estimate from the Washington Post, which participated in the investigation, states only that “1,000 people spread across 50 different countries were identified as having numbers on the list, among them are ‘several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials.’ This includes Robert Malley, the Biden administration’s lead Iran negotiator, and journalists for CNN, the Associated Press, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.” Other news agencies that were hacked by Pegasus include Agence France-Presse, Al Jazeera, France 24, Radio Free Europe, Mediapart, El País, the Associated Press, Le Monde, Bloomberg, the Economist, Reuters and Voice of America.
Some are inevitably wondering why the Biden White House has been silent about NSO. It has not identified the Israeli firm as a threat to national security and made demands to the Israeli government that it intercede with NSO and shut down the use of Pegasus until some international regulation of the use of hacking software can be developed. Part of the explanation for the reluctance might be that Biden’s senior adviser Anita Dunn’s consulting firm SKDKickerbocker was hired by NSO in 2019 to provide “public relations” advice to improve the company’s image.
The reluctance, of course, also derives from the fact that Israel is involved, but those with longer memories of the Jewish state’s record in stealing American secrets should not be surprised by this latest venture. Israeli-recruited U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard was, for example, the most damaging spy in U.S. history. And Israel has, in fact, a long history of stealing U.S. technology and military secrets to include sharing them with countries that Washington has regarded as enemies, including China and Russia.
Israel always features prominently in the annual FBI report called Foreign Economic Collection and Industrial Espionage. The 2005 report states: “Israel has an active program to gather proprietary information within the United States, these collection activities are primarily directed at obtaining information on military systems and advanced computing applications that can be used in Israel’s sizeable armaments industry.” It adds that: “Israel recruits spies, uses electronic methods, and carries out computer intrusion to gain the information.” A 1996 Defense Investigative Service report noted that: “Israel has great success stealing technology by exploiting the numerous co-production projects that it has with the Pentagon.” It says: “Placing Israeli nationals in key industries is a technique utilized with great success.” A General Accounting Office (GAO) examination of espionage directed against American defense and security industries described how: “Israeli citizens residing in the U.S. had stolen sensitive technology to manufacture artillery gun tubes, obtain classified plans for reconnaissance systems, and pass sensitive aerospace designs to unauthorized users.” The GAO concluded that: “Israel conducts,” and this is a quote, “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any U.S. ally.” More recently, FBI counterintelligence officer John Cole has reported how many cases of Israeli espionage are dropped under orders from the Justice Department. He has provided a conservative estimate of 125 viable investigations into Israeli espionage — involving both American citizens and Israelis — that were stopped due to political pressure.
So Israel gets yet another pass on its spying against the United States. Indeed, the Biden Administration has yet to definitively comment on the latest impropriety. One wonders when the penny will drop and the American people will rise up and say “enough is enough.”
Syrian air defense units intercept Israeli missiles near Damascus, thwarting THIRD raid in a week – Russian MoD
RT | July 26, 2021
The Syrian military has intercepted two missiles fired by Israeli fighter jets at Damascus suburb of Sayyidah Zaynab over the weekend, successfully thwarting the third such airstrike in a week, using Russian-made air defense systems.
The airstrike was carried out from outside the Syrian airspace, around 5:40am Sunday morning, when two Israeli F-16 jets fired two guided missiles, targeting unspecified facilities in the town of Set (Sayyidah) Zaynab some 10km south of Damascus.
Syrian air defense units – equipped with Russian-made Buk-M2E systems – successfully intercepted both of them, the head of the Russian Reconciliation Center for Syria, Rear Admiral Vadim Kulit, said in a daily briefing.
On Wednesday night, two Israeli F-16 jets fired four guided missiles from Lebanese airspace at Syria’s Homs province. All of them were shot down, also using Russian-made Buk-M2Es.
On Monday night, four Israeli jets penetrated Syrian airspace through the area of At-Tanf on the Jordanian border, controlled by the US military, and fired eight missiles into Aleppo province. Seven of them were reportedly shot down by Buk-M2 and Pantsir-S systems, but the remaining one struck a scientific research facility in the town of Safira.
While Israeli officials rarely acknowledge such raids, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) warplanes routinely rained down missiles on Syrian territory over the past years, under the pretext of self-defense against the “Iranian threat.”
Damascus has always protested the repeated attacks as blatant acts of aggression, while Russia, Turkey and Iran recently jointly condemned Israeli raids as violations of sovereignty and international humanitarian laws.
Meet Toka, the Most Dangerous Israeli Spyware Firm You’ve Never Heard Of
By Whitney Webb | MintPress News | July 21, 2021
LONDON –This past Sunday, an investigation into the global abuse of spyware developed by veterans of Israeli intelligence Unit 8200 gained widespread attention, as it was revealed that the software – sold to democratic and authoritarian governments alike – had been used to illegally spy on an estimated 50,000 individuals. Among those who had their communications and devices spied on by the software, known as Pegasus, were journalists, human rights activists, business executives, academics and prominent political leaders. Among those targeted political leaders, per reports, were the current leaders of France, Pakistan, South Africa, Egypt, Morocco and Iraq.
The abuse of Pegasus software in this very way has been known for several years, though these latest revelations appear to have gained such traction in the mainstream owing to the high number of civilians who have reportedly been surveilled through its use. The continuation of the now-years-long scandal surrounding the abuse of Pegasus has also brought considerable controversy and notoriety to the Israeli company that developed it, the NSO Group.
While the NSO Group has become infamous, other Israeli companies with even deeper ties to Israel’s intelligence apparatus have been selling software that not only provides the exact same services to governments and intelligence agencies but purports to go even farther.
Originally founded by former Israeli Prime Minister and Jeffrey Epstein associate Ehud Barak, one of these companies’ wares are being used by countries around the world, including in developing countries with the direct facilitation of global financial institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the World Bank. In addition, the software is only made available to governments that are “trusted” by Israel’s government, which “works closely” with the company.
Despite the fact that this firm has been around since 2018 and was covered in detail by this author for MintPress News in January 2020, no mainstream outlet – including those that have extensively covered the NSO Group – has bothered to examine the implications of this story.
Worse than Pegasus
Toka was launched in 2018 with the explicit purpose of selling a “tailored ecosystem of cyber capabilities and software products for governmental, law enforcement, and security agencies.” According to a profile of the company published in Forbes shortly after it launched, Toka advertised itself as “a one-stop hacking shop for governments that require extra capability to fight terrorists and other threats to national security in the digital domain.”
Toka launched with plans to “provide spy tools for whatever device its clients require,” including not only smartphones but a “special focus on the so-called Internet of Things (IoT).” Per the company, this includes devices like Amazon Echo, Google Nest-connected home products, as well as connected fridges, thermostats and alarms. Exploits in these products discovered by Toka, the company said at the time, would not be disclosed to vendors, meaning those flaws would continue to remain vulnerable to any hacker, whether a client of Toka or not.
Today, Toka’s software suite claims to offer its customers in law enforcement, government and intelligence the ability to obtain “targeted intelligence” and to conduct “forensic investigations” as well as “covert operations.” In addition, Toka offers governments its “Cyber Designers” service, which provides “agencies with the full-spectrum strategies, customized projects and technologies needed to keep critical infrastructure, the digital landscape and government institutions secure and durable.”
Given that NSO’s Pegasus targets only smartphones, Toka’s hacking suite – which, like Pegasus, is also classified as a “lawful intercept” product – is capable of targeting any device connected to the internet, including but not limited to smartphones. In addition, its target clientele are the same as those of Pegasus, providing an easy opportunity for governments to gain access to even more surveillance capabilities than Pegasus offers, but without risking notoriety in the media, since Toka has long avoided the limelight.
In addition, while Toka professes that its products are only used by “trusted” governments and agencies to combat “terrorism” and maintain order and public safety, the sales pitch for the NSO Group’s Pegasus is remarkably similar, and that sales pitch has not stopped its software from being used to target dissidents, politicians and journalists. It also allows many of the same groups who are Toka clients, like intelligence agencies, to use these tools for the purpose of obtaining blackmail. The use of blackmail by Israeli security agencies against civilian Palestinians to attempt to weaken Palestinian society and for political persecution is well-documented.
Toka has been described by market analysts as an “offensive security” company, though the company’s leadership rejects this characterization. Company co-founder and current CEO Yaron Rosen asserted that, as opposed to purely offensive, the company’s operations are “something in the middle,” which he classifies as bridging cyber defense and offensive cyber activities — e.g., hacking.
The company’s activities are concerning in light of the fact that Toka has been directly partnered with Israel’s Ministry of Defense and other Israeli intelligence and security agencies since its founding. The company “works closely” with these government agencies, according to an Israeli Ministry of Defense website. This collaboration, per Toka, is meant to “enhance” their products. Toka’s direct IDF links are in contrast to the NSO Group, a company that does not maintain overt ties with the Israeli security state.
Toka’s direct collaboration with Israel’s government is also made clear through its claim that it sells its products and offers its services only to “trusted” governments, law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies. Toka’s Rosen has stated that Russia, China, and “other enemy countries” would never be customers of the company. In other words, only countries aligned with Israeli policy goals, particularly in occupied Palestine, are permitted to be customers and gain access to its trove of powerful hacking tools. This is consistent with Israeli government efforts to leverage Israel’s hi-tech sector as a means of countering the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS) movement globally.
Further evidence that Toka is part of this Israeli government effort to seed foreign governments with technology products deeply tied to Israel’s military and intelligence services is the fact that one of the main investors in Toka is Dell Technologies Capital, which is an extension of the well-known tech company Dell. Dell was founded by Michael Dell, a well-known pro-Israel partisan who has donated millions of dollars to the Friends of the IDF and is one of the top supporters of the so-called “anti-BDS” bills that prevent publicly employed individuals or public institutions in several U.S. states from supporting non-violent boycotts of Israel, even on humanitarian grounds. As MintPress previously noted, the fact that a major producer of consumer electronic goods is heavily investing in a company that markets the hacking of that very technology should be a red flag.
The government’s initial admitted use of the hi-tech sector to counter the BDS movement coincided with the launch of a new Israeli military and intelligence agency policy in 2012, whereby “cyber-related and intelligence projects that were previously carried out in-house in the Israeli military and Israel’s main intelligence arms are transferred to companies that, in some cases, were built for this exact purpose.”
One of the reasons this was reportedly launched was to retain members of Unit 8200 engaged in military work who were moving to jobs in the country’s high-paying tech sector. Through this new policy that has worked to essentially merge much of the private tech sector with Israel’s national security state, some Unit 8200 and other intelligence veterans continue their work for the state but benefit from a private sector salary. The end result is that an unknown – and likely very high – number of Israeli tech companies are led by veterans of the Israeli military and Israeli intelligence agencies and serve, for all intents and purposes, as front companies. A closer examination of Toka strongly suggests that it is one such front company.
Toka — born out of Israel’s national security state
The company was co-founded by Ehud Barak, Alon Kantor, Kfir Waldman and retired IDF Brigadier General Yaron Rosen. Rosen, the firm’s founding CEO and now co-CEO, is the former Chief of the IDF’s cyber staff, where he was “the lead architect of all [IDF] cyber activities,” including those executed by Israeli military intelligence Unit 8200. Alon Kantor is the former Vice President of Business Development for Check Point Software, a software and hardware company founded by Unit 8200 veterans. Kfir Waldman is the former CEO of Go Arc and a former Director of Engineering at technology giant Cisco. Cisco is a leader in the field of Internet of Things devices and IoT cybersecurity, while Go Arc focuses on applications for mobile devices. As previously mentioned, Toka hacks not only mobile devices but also has a “special focus” on hacking IoT devices.
A slide from an April 20, 2021 presentation given by Toka’s VP of Global Sales, Michael Anderson
In addition to having served as prime minister of Israel, Toka co-founder Ehud Barak previously served as head of Israeli military intelligence directorate Aman, as well as several other prominent posts in the IDF, before eventually leading the Israeli military as minister of defense. While minister of defense, he led Operation Cast Lead against the blockaded Gaza Strip in 2009, which resulted in the deaths of over 1,000 Palestinians and saw Israel illegally use chemical weapons against civilians.
Toka is the first start-up created by Barak. However, Barak had previously chaired and invested in Carbyne911, a controversial Israeli emergency services start-up that has expanded around the world and has become particularly entrenched in the United States. Carbyne’s success has been despite the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, given that the intelligence-linked pedophile and sex trafficker had invested heavily in the company at Barak’s behest. Barak’s close relationship with Epstein, including overnight visits to Epstein’s now-notorious island and apartment complexes that housed trafficked women and underage girls, has been extensively documented.
Barak stepped away from Toka in April of last year, likely as the result of the controversy over his Epstein links, which also saw Barak withdraw from his chairmanship of Carbyne in the wake of Epstein’s death. Considerable evidence has pointed to Epstein having been an intelligence asset of Israeli military intelligence who accrued blackmail on powerful individuals for the benefit of Israel’s national security state and other intelligence agencies, as well as for personal gain.
Another notable Toka executive is Nir Peleg, the company’s Vice President for Strategic Projects. Peleg is the former head of the Research and Development Division at Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, where he led national cybersecurity projects as well as government initiatives and collaborations with international partners and Israeli cybersecurity innovative companies. Prior to this, Peleg claims to have served for more than 20 years in leading positions at the IDF’s “elite technology unit,” though he does specify exactly which unit this was. His LinkedIn profile lists him as having been head of the IDF’s entire Technology Department from 2008 to 2011.
While at Israel’s National Cyber Directorate, Peleg worked closely with Tal Goldstein, now the head of strategy for the World Economic Forum’s Partnership against Cybercrime (WEF-PAC), whose members include government agencies of the U.S., Israel and the U.K., along with some of the world’s most powerful companies in technology and finance. The goal of this effort is to establish a global entity that is capable of controlling the flow of information, data, and money on the internet. Notably, Toka CEO Yaron Rosen recently called for essentially this exact organization to be established when he stated that the international community needed to urgently create the “cyber” equivalent of the World Health Organization to combat the so-called “cyber pandemic.”
Claims that a “cyber pandemic” is imminent have been frequent from individuals tied to the WEF-PAC, including CEO of Checkpoint Software Gil Shwed. Checkpoint is a member of WEF-PAC and two of its former vice presidents, Michael Anderson and Alon Kantor, are now Vice President for Global Sales and co-CEO of Toka, respectively.
The Wolrd Economic Forum does little to hide its partnership with former Israeli intelligence officials
Toka’s Chief Technology Officer, and the chief architect of its hacking suite, is Moty Zaltsman, who is the only chief executive of the company not listed on the firm’s website. Per his LinkedIn, Zaltsman was the Chief Technology Officer for then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Last January, when Toka was covered by MintPress News, his profile stated that he had developed “offensive technologies” for Israel’s head of state, but Zaltsman has since removed this claim. The last Toka executive of note is Michael Volfman, the company’s Vice President of Research and Development. Volfman was previously a cyber research and development leader at an unspecified “leading technology unit” of the IDF.
Also worth mentioning are Toka’s main investors, particularly Entrèe Capital, which is managed by Aviad Eyal and Ran Achituv. Achituv, who manages Entrée’s investment in Toka and sits on Toka’s board of directors, was the founder of the IDF’s satellite-based signals intelligence unit and also a former senior vice president at both Amdocs and Comverse Infosys. Both Amdocs and Comverse courted scandal in the late 1990s and early 2000s for their role in a massive Israeli government-backed espionage operation that targeted U.S. federal agencies during that period.
Despite this scandal and others in the company’s past, Comverse subsidiary Verint was subsequently contracted by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) to bug the telecommunications network of Verizon shortly after their previous espionage scandal was covered by mainstream media. The contract was part of Operation Stellar Winds and was approved by then-NSA Director Keith Alexander, who has since been an outspoken advocate of closer Israeli-American government cooperation in cybersecurity.
In addition to Entrèe Capital, Andreessen Horowitz is another of Toka’s main investors. The venture capital firm co-founded by Silicon Valley titan Marc Andreessen is currently advised by former Secretary of the Treasury Larry Summers, a close friend of the infamous pedophile Jeffery Epstein. Early investors in Toka that are no longer listed on the firm’s website include Launch Capital, which is deeply tied to the Pritzker family — one of the wealthiest families in the U.S., with close ties to the Clintons and Obamas as well as the U.S.’ pro-Israel lobby — and Ray Rothrock, a venture capitalist who spent nearly three decades at VenRock, the Rockefeller family venture capital fund.
In light of the aforementioned policy of Israel’s government to use private tech companies as fronts, the combination of Toka’s direct Israeli government ties, the nature of its products and services, and the numerous, significant connections of its leaders and investors to both Israeli military intelligence and past Israeli espionage scandals strongly suggests that Toka is one such front.
If this is the case, there is reason to believe that, when Toka clients hack and gain access to a device, elements of the Israeli state could also gain access. This concern is born out of the fact that Israeli intelligence has engaged in this exact type of behavior before as part of the PROMIS software scandal, whereby Israeli “superspy” Robert Maxwell sold bugged software to the U.S. government, including highly sensitive locations involved in classified nuclear weapons research. When that software, known as PROMIS, was installed on U.S. government computers, Israeli intelligence gained access to those same systems and devices.
The U.S. government was not the only target of this operation, however, as the bugged PROMIS software was placed on the networks of several intelligence agencies around the world as well as powerful corporations and several large banks. Israeli intelligence gained access to all of their systems until the compromised nature of the software was made public. However, Israel’s government was not held accountable by the U.S. government or the international community for its far-reaching espionage program, a program directly facilitated by technology-focused front companies. The similarities between the products marketed and clients targeted by Maxwell during the PROMIS scandal and currently by Toka are considerable.
World Bank, IDB aid Toka in targeting Palestine’s allies
While the ties between Toka and Israel’s national security state are clear as day, what is also significant and unsettling about this company is how its entry into developing and developed countries alike is being facilitated by global financial institutions, specifically the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank. Notably, these are the only deals with governments that Toka advertises on its website, as the others are not made public.
Several projects funded by one or another of these two institutions have seen Toka become the “cyber designer” of national cybersecurity strategies for Nigeria and Chile since last year. Significantly, both countries’ populations show strong support for Palestine and the BDS movement. In addition, Toka garnered a World Bank-funded contract with the government of Moldova, an ally of Israel, last September.
The World Bank selected Toka in February of last year to “enhance Nigeria’s cyber development,” which includes developing “national frameworks, technical capabilities and enhancement of skills.” Through the World Bank contract, Toka has now become so intimately involved with both the public and private sectors of Nigeria that it relates to the country’s “cyber ecosystem.” The World Bank’s decision to choose Toka is likely the result of a partnership forged in 2019 by the state of Israel with the global financial institution “to boost cybersecurity in the developing world,” with a focus on Africa and Asia.
Toka executives pose with Nigerian officials in 2020. Photo | Israel Defense
“Designing and building sustainable and robust national cyber strategy and cyber resilience is a critical enabler to fulfilling the objectives of Nigeria’s national cybersecurity policy and strategic framework,” Toka CEO Yaron Rosen said in a press release regarding the contract.
Given Toka’s aforementioned use of its technology for only “trusted” governments, it is notable that Nigeria has been a strong ally of Palestine for most of the past decade, save for one abstention at a crucial UN vote in 2014. In addition to the government, numerous student groups, human rights organizations, and Islamic organizations in the country are outspoken in their support for Palestine. With Toka’s efforts to offer its products only to countries who align themselves with “friendly” countries, their now intimate involvement with Nigeria’s cyber development could soon have consequences for a government that has tended to support the Palestinian cause. This is even more likely given Toka CEO Rosen’s statements at an April 2021 event hosted by Israel’s Ministry of Economy, where he emphasized the role of cyber in developing countries specifically in terms of their national defense and economic strategy.
Three months after the deal was struck with Nigeria through the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) selected Toka to advise the government of Chile on “next steps for the country’s national cybersecurity readiness and operational capacity building.” As part of the project, “Toka will assess the current cybersecurity gaps and challenges in Chile and support the IDB project implementation by recommending specific cybersecurity readiness improvements,” per a press release. Toka claims it will help “establish Chile as a cybersecurity leader in South America.” Regarding the deal, Toka’s Rosen stated that he was “thankful” that the IDB had “provided us with this opportunity to work with the Government of Chile.”
Israel signed consequential agreements for cooperation with the IDB in 2015, before further deepening those ties in 2019 by partnering with the IDB to invest $250 million from Israeli institutions in Latin America specifically.
Toka executives are pictured with Chilean officials during a 2020 meeting in Santiago
Like Nigeria, Chile has a strong connection with Palestine and is often a target of Israeli government influence efforts. Though the current far-right government of Sebastián Piñera has grown close to Israel, Chile is home to the largest Palestinian exile community in the world outside of the Middle East. As a result, Chile has one of the strongest BDS movements in the Americas, with cities declaring a non-violent boycott of Israel until the Piñera administration stepped in to claim that such boycotts can only be implemented at the federal level. Palestinian Chileans have strong influence on Chilean politics, with a recent, popular presidential candidate, Daniel Jadue, being the son of Palestinian immigrants to Chile. Earlier this year, in June, Chile’s congress drafted a bill to boycott goods, services and products from illegal Israeli settlements.
While Toka frames both of these projects as aimed at helping the cyber readiness and economies of the countries it now services, Israeli media has painted a different picture. For instance, Haaretz wrote that Israel’s partnerships with development banks, specifically those made in 2019 that resulted in these Toka contracts, were planned by an inter-ministerial committee set up by then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “to realize the potential of international development to strengthen the Israeli economy, improve Israel’s political standing and strengthen its international role.” One source, quoted by Haaretz as being close to this undertaking, stated that “development banks are a way to help advance Israel’s interests and agenda in the developing world, including Latin America. But it’s not philanthropy.”
Given these statements, and Toka’s own modus operandi as a company and its background, it seems highly likely that the reason both Nigeria and Chile were chosen as the first of Toka’s development banks contracts was aimed at advancing the Israeli government’s agenda in those specific countries, one that seeks to counter and mitigate the vocal support for Palestine among those countries’ inhabitants.
The spyware problem goes far beyond NSO Group
The NSO Group and its Pegasus software is clearly a major scandal that deserves scrutiny. However, the treatment of the incident by the media has largely absolved the Israeli government of any role in that affair, despite the fact that the NSO Group’s sales of Pegasus to foreign governments has been approved and defended by Israel’s government. This, of course, means that Israel’s government has obvious responsibility in the whole scandal as well.
In addition, the myopic focus on the NSO Group when it comes to mainstream media reporting on Israeli private spyware and the threats it poses means that other companies, like Toka, go uninvestigated, even if their products present an even greater potential for abuse and illegal surveillance than those currently marketed and sold by the NSO Group.
Given the longstanding history of Israeli intelligence’s use of technology firms for international surveillance and espionage, as well as its admitted policy of using tech companies as fronts to combat BDS and ensure Israel’s “cyber dominance,” the investigation into Israeli spyware cannot stop just with NSO Group. However, not stopping there risks directly challenging the Israeli state, particularly in Toka’s case, and this is something that mainstream media outlets tend to avoid. This is due to a mix of factors, but the fact that NSO’s Pegasus has been used to spy on journalists so extensively certainly doesn’t help the matter.
Yet, Israel’s weaponization of its tech industry, and the global use of its spyware offerings by governments and security agencies around the world, must be addressed, especially because it has been explicitly weaponized to prevent non-violent boycotts of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, including those solely based on humanitarian grounds or out of respect for international laws that Israel routinely breaks. Allowing a government to engage in this activity on a global scale to stifle criticism of flagrantly illegal policies and war crimes cannot continue and this should be the case for any government, not just Israel.
If the outlets eagerly reporting on the latest Pegasus revelations are truly concerned with the abuse of spyware by governments and intelligence agencies around the world, they should also give attention to Toka, as it is actively arming these same institutions with weapons far worse than any NSO Group product.
Whitney Webb has been a professional writer, researcher and journalist since 2016. She has written for several websites and, from 2017 to 2020, was a staff writer and senior investigative reporter for MintPress News. She currently writes for her own outlet Unlimited Hangout and contributes to The Last American Vagabond and MintPress News.
Israel’s Entryism and the Campaign to Create a Binational Security State
Graphic by Antonio Cabrera
Lowkey is joined by Whitney Webb to examine the IDF’s military intelligence Unit 8200, which gave birth to the NSO group responsible for Pegasus Spyware, and how Israel’s national security state is merging with that of the United States to target free speech and dissent:
MintPress News | July 22, 2021
The new MintPress podcast, “The Watchdog,” hosted by British-Iraqi hip hop artist Lowkey closely examines organizations that are in the public interest to know about including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.
For the launch of “The Watchdog,” we examine the idea that Israel, through well-camouflaged proxies, has been making efforts to merge with the U.S.national security state. The podcast delves deep into two organizations we deemed essential to this process of entryism. For this task, we enlisted the help of the prolific writer, researcher into intelligence, surveillance, civil liberties, and big tech on the macro and the micro-level, Whitney Webb.
The first part of the podcast focuses on the IDF Unit 8200, a military intelligence unit in the Israeli Army known for monitoring Palestinian communication and using that information to blackmail them. The unit has also carried out cyber attacks on other states. Unit 8200 gave birth to the NSO Group, the supposedly private company responsible for the Pegasus Spyware which has recently been used around the world to target dissidents, journalists, activists, and more. The lesson which must come from this global scandal is that companies with any Unit 8200 involvement must be seriously examined.
The NSO group is far from the only way in which Unit 8200 actors have been able to insinuate themselves into the business of other governments. Following a 2012 policy set by the Benjamin Netanyahu government, Israel set about siphoning the functions of its military intelligence into private companies. Former Unit 8200 members set up staff and numerous important cybersecurity companies across the world, tasked with guarding swathes of very sensitive data.
Whitney Webb explores her research by looking at Unit 8200 founded and-or staffed organizations like Cybereason, National Start-up Central, and Cyber Threat Intelligence League which between them have access to masses of information in both the U.S. and UK. Lowkey draws a connection between Cybereason, their partner Leidos and the 2012 British census. He also delves into the recently widely referenced cybersecurity company Proofpoint, identifying for the first time the connection between this company and Unit 8200.
This information being visible to both former and current employees of the Israeli government leads to a power imbalance which is allowing Israel to not only prevent any possibility of Boycott Divestment and Sanctions being practiced in the most vital sectors but also helps to create a binational security state entrenched with its interests.
The second organization discussed as a key part of Israel’s entryism into the U.S. security state is the Anti-Defamation League. Webb reveals some of the context around the founding of the organization over a century ago and details of its trajectory to today. Lowkey pointed out that an internal FBI memo in 1969 had questioned whether the ADL violated U.S. law by failing to register a foreign agent and asserted that it would be “incredible” to assume it was not being furnished by the Israeli government in its infiltration activities targeting Arab-American student groups.
Webb defined the ADL as “an intelligence agency posing as a civil rights organization.” She also added to Lowkey’s point that it had not only spied on Arab-American student groups but also groups like Greenpeace and those that were working to end apartheid in South Africa, they were sending information they got from these infiltrations to Mossad and the Apartheid regime.
Today, the ADL is not only designated as a “trusted-flagger” by Youtube but it also has been seen to use social media posts to report people to the FBI. The ADL’s collaboration with the FBI started small in the civil rights era and has now developed to the point that the ADL is now the largest nongovernmental trainer of law enforcement in the U.S. It has been made clear that in Biden’s new Domestic Homeland Security policy arrangement, individuals are being flagged by the ADL, who are then directing the FBI to investigate them.
The reasons for investigation as potential domestic terrorists can be as simple as an individual’s social media history. Lowkey points to the ADL campaigns against Ilhan Omar, Marc Lamont Hill, and Linda Sarsour and Webb describes the organization “as an arm of the Israel Lobby.”
These two organizations must be studied critically if we are to understand the way Israel projects its power into other places, particularly in the United States of America.
Lowkey is a British-Iraqi hip hop artist, academic, political campaigner, and a MintPress video and podcast host.
Where’s the Rage for Israel and NSO’s Pegasus the West Had for China’s Huawei?
By Morgan Artyukhina – Sputnik – 21.07.2021
Anger has swirled around the globe over revelations that Pegasus spyware created by Israeli software firm NSO Group has been used by governments to wiretap journalists and public figures. However, the fury is mild when compared to claims Beijing compelled Huawei to put a “backdoor” into its phones, which has never been proven.
Earlier this week, a group of news outlets including the Washington Post and Forbidden Stories, along with human rights group Amnesty International, revealed disturbing findings: governments around the globe have been buying up Pegasus spyware from NSO Group and using it to spy on journalists, public figures, and even other world leaders.
50,000 Phones Targeted
Thousands of phone numbers are on the list, with some of the biggest names including French President Emmanuel Macron and Moroccan journalists Omar Radi, both allegedly wiretapped by Morocco, and journalist Jamal Khashoggi, allegedly wiretapped by his native Saudi Arabia prior to being killed by a Saudi hit squad at the Saudi consulate in October 2019.
In all, 180 journalists were targeted in 20 countries, including Kazakhstan, India, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Azerbaijan, Hungary, Morocco, Rwanda, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Mexico, Egypt, Algeria, Togo, Turkey, France, Spain and the United Kingdom. They also targeted at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials, including high-level officials like cabinet ministers, diplomats, and military officers, according to The Washington Post.
Also on the list were 10 prime ministers, three presidents, and one king, including Iraqi President Barham Salih, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, the prime ministers of Pakistan, Egypt, and Morocco, and seven former heads of government from Lebanon, Uganda, and Belgium, and several other countries.
Shalev Hulio, NSO’s chief executive and co-founder, has cast the story as flimsy, but said the company is “investigating every allegation … and if we find that it is true, we will take strong action.”
“NSO Group’s technologies have helped prevent terror attacks, gun violence, car explosions and suicide bombings. NSO Group is on a lifesaving mission and the company will faithfully execute this mission undeterred, despite any and all continued attempts to discredit it on false grounds,” the company told the US Public Broadcasting Service.
On Wednesday, the firm put out a press release saying “enough is enough,” announcing it would cease responding to media inquiries about what it called a “vicious and slanderous campaign.”
“NSO is a technology company. We do not operate the system, nor do we have access to the data of our customers, yet they are obligated to provide us with such information under investigations,” the company added.
The Israeli government has confirmed it “approves the export of cyber products exclusively to governmental entities, for lawful use, and only for the purpose of preventing and investigating crime and counterterrorism, under end use /end user certificates provided by the acquiring government. In cases where exported items are used in violation of export licenses or end use certificates, appropriate measures are taken.”
However, it denied having any knowledge of the use of Pegasus to spy on other targets, and noted to the Post that “Israel does not have access to the information gathered by NSO’s clients.”
That said, a former senior US national security official who has worked closely with the Israeli security services also told the outlet “It’s crazy to think that NSO wouldn’t share sensitive national security information with the government of Israel. That doesn’t mean they’re a front for the Israeli security agencies, but governments around the world assume that NSO is working with Israel.”
How Have Nations Reacted?
Representatives from many of the nations implicated in the investigation have unanimously denied the reports they spied on journalists, dissidents, and world figures, insisting their governments are based on the rule of law. However, it’s notable that not all of the countries where journalists were targeted have been asked for comment, with France, Spain, and the UK being notable exceptions.
Asked by The Hindu, a White House spokesperson said on Wednesday that “The United States condemns the harassment or extrajudicial surveillance of journalists, human rights activists, or other perceived regime critics.”
However, despite the admission by NSO that it sells such software and by Israel that it, at the very least, approved of each sale, and in light of comments by foreign intelligence officials that Israel likely materially benefitted from the affair by gleaning information from the group, it seems that a bigger scandal would be expected. But not a single government has demanded punishment for either NSO or Israel, or decried even the possibility that Israel helped countries wiretap people not suspected of criminal actions, or raised fears that a country’s government likely got ahold of classified information from them via illegal means.
There have been no calls for sanctions against Israel or NSO or any senior figures at NSO, or prosecutions, or frankly even acknowledgements that the affair is even happening outside of dry-mouthed condemnations. In fact, the only calls for sanctions have been by journalists themselves, such as the Intercept’s Ryan Grim and Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abuminah.
The reactions – and lack thereof – stand in stark comparison to how Chinese tech giant Huawei has been treated.
Huawei Crucified Without Evidence
Shenzhen-based Huawei is the world’s largest manufacturer of both telecommunications equipment and smartphones and a major supplier of 5G internet service. The company was started in 1987 by Ren Zhangfei, a former Chinese military engineer, although he owns less than 2% of its shares, which are owned by Huawei employees.
The US has claimed for years that Ren’s military experience and membership in the Communist Party of China make Huawei a security liability, but in 2018 a more concerted effort began aimed at forcing US military and government agencies from using products by Huawei and another Chinese phone maker, ZTE, claiming that the CPC had forced Huawei to insert a secret “back door” into its phones and networks, enabling the Chinese government to spy on users if so desired.
The company and the Chinese government have both denied that such a backdoor does or even could exist or that they would pursue one if it were possible.
“If they believe there’s a backdoor, they should offer evidence to prove it,” Huawei chairman Liang Hua challenged US intelligence in January 2019. At the time, Washington said it didn’t need to, citing Huawei’s alleged proximity to the Chinese government as sufficient proof.
However, as the US began hounding allies in Germany and the “Five Eyes” nations to drop Huawei’s technologies, it did begin providing them with evidence to support its claims – evidence London, Berlin, and Paris all said wasn’t very convincing. Still, within months each of them had either rejected bids by Huawei or suddenly found new evidence to justify falling into line with US demands.
The firm was placed on a US blacklist in 2019, requiring Americans to obtain a special license from the US Department of Commerce before doing business with Huawei, effectively banning Americans from buying Huawei’s phones, and several nations have now sanctioned Huawei as well. The company’s CFO, Meng Wanzhou, was also arrested in Canada in connection with charges in a US court that aren’t related to the espionage allegations but which are widely seen as further persecution of the company.
The sanctions had their effect, too: in March, a first-quarter earnings report showed its sales down 16.5% year-on, part of a trend that caused it to sell its Honor smartphone marquee last year.
Legacy of Israeli Spying on Allies
In September 2019, Politico reported that US government officials had concluded Israel was responsible for placing cell phone surveillance devices called “Stingrays” around Washington, DC, and had even used them to spy on White House communications. A former senior official used as a source for the article said the devices were likely intended to spy specifically on then-US President Donald Trump, a known lover of his iPhone.
Then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed the report, saying, “Israel doesn’t conduct espionage operations in the United States, period.”
However, the claims go back much further. In 1985, US intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard was arrested, charged, and later convicted of espionage after he passed classified US Navy documents to Israel, including dirt on Israel’s Arab neighbors, for $1,500 a month.
Jonathan Pollard, U.S. Navy ID picture
Israel also spied on then-US Secretary of State John Kerry in 2014 and 2015 during negotiations for what became the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, according to reports by Der Spiegel and the Wall Street Journal.
In 2017, Le Monde revealed that Israel’s Mossad had penetrated the French intelligence directorate in what it called Operation Ratafia, with the goal of developing close relationships with fellow spies “to the point of crossing the line of turning them into double agents.”
None of these brought calls for sanctions, either, revealing how politically motivated the attacks on Huawei and other Chinese tech firms really are. Why does the West continue to tolerate the Israeli government spying on them and their citizens?
Israeli Firm Helped Governments Target Journalists, Activists with 0-Days and Spyware
By Ravie Lakshmanan | The Hacker News | July 16, 2021
Two of the zero-day Windows flaws rectified by Microsoft as part of its Patch Tuesday update earlier this week were weaponized by an Israel-based company called Candiru in a series of “precision attacks” to hack more than 100 journalists, academics, activists, and political dissidents globally.
The spyware vendor was also formally identified as the commercial surveillance company that Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) revealed as exploiting multiple zero-day vulnerabilities in Chrome browser to target victims located in Armenia, according to a report published by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.
“Candiru‘s apparent widespread presence, and the use of its surveillance technology against global civil society, is a potent reminder that the mercenary spyware industry contains many players and is prone to widespread abuse,” Citizen Lab researchers said. “This case demonstrates, yet again, that in the absence of any international safeguards or strong government export controls, spyware vendors will sell to government clients who will routinely abuse their services.”
Founded in 2014, the private-sector offensive actor (PSOA) — codenamed “Sourgum” by Microsoft — is said to be the developer of an espionage toolkit dubbed DevilsTongue that’s exclusively sold to governments and is capable of infecting and monitoring a broad range of devices across different platforms, including iPhones, Androids, Macs, PCs, and cloud accounts.
Citizen Lab said it was able to recover a copy of Candiru’s Windows spyware after obtaining a hard drive from “a politically active victim in Western Europe,” which was then reverse engineered to identify two never-before-seen Windows zero-day exploits for vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2021-31979 and CVE-2021-33771 that were leveraged to install malware on victim boxes.
The infection chain relied on a mix of browser and Windows exploits, with the former served via single-use URLs sent to targets on messaging applications such as WhatsApp. Microsoft addressed both the privilege escalation flaws, which enable an adversary to escape browser sandboxes and gain kernel code execution, on July 13.
The intrusions culminated in the deployment of DevilsTongue, a modular C/C++-based backdoor equipped with a number of capabilities, including exfiltrating files, exporting messages saved in the encrypted messaging app Signal, and stealing cookies and passwords from Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera browsers.
Microsoft’s analysis of the digital weapon also found that it could abuse the stolen cookies from logged-in email and social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Gmail, Yahoo, Mail.ru, Odnoklassniki, and Vkontakte to collect information, read the victim’s messages, retrieve photos, and even send messages on their behalf, thus allowing the threat actor to send malicious links directly from a compromised user’s computer.
Separately, the Citizen Lab report also tied the two Google Chrome vulnerabilities disclosed by the search giant on Wednesday — CVE-2021-21166 and CVE-2021-30551 — to the Tel Aviv company, noting overlaps in the websites that were used to distribute the exploits.
Furthermore, 764 domains linked to Candiru’s spyware infrastructure were uncovered, with many of the domains masquerading as advocacy organizations such as Amnesty International, the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as media companies, and other civil-society themed entities. Some of the systems under their control were operated from Saudi Arabia, Israel, U.A.E., Hungary, and Indonesia.
Over 100 victims of SOURGUM’s malware have been identified to date, with targets located in Palestine, Israel, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Spain (Catalonia), United Kingdom, Turkey, Armenia, and Singapore. “These attacks have largely targeted consumer accounts, indicating Sourgum’s customers were pursuing particular individuals,” Microsoft’s General Manager of Digital Security Unit, Cristin Goodwin, said.
The latest report arrives as TAG researchers Maddie Stone and Clement Lecigne noted a surge in attackers using more zero-day exploits in their cyber offensives, in part fueled by more commercial vendors selling access to zero-days than in the early 2010s.
“Private-sector offensive actors are private companies that manufacture and sell cyberweapons in hacking-as-a-service packages, often to government agencies around the world, to hack into their targets’ computers, phones, network infrastructure, and other devices,” Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) said in a technical rundown.
“With these hacking packages, usually the government agencies choose the targets and run the actual operations themselves. The tools, tactics, and procedures used by these companies only adds to the complexity, scale, and sophistication of attacks,” MSTIC added.
Israel exploits case of Mexico official wanted for torture, murder for diplomatic gain
MEMO | July 15, 2021
The notorious case of former top Mexican official wanted in connection with the torture, abduction and murder of 43 students, and for embezzling $50 million of state funds, has become mired in a diplomatic tussle between Israel and Mexico over the occupation state’s treatment of Palestinians.
Tomás Zerón de Lucio, the former director of Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI, fled to Israel following the opening of an investigation into his role in the 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping, which continues to cause a storm in Mexico to this day. Zeron headed the criminal investigation, but his report was discredited after it was discovered that crucial testimony was obtained under torture, evidence was mishandled and promising leads ignored.
Zeron has dismissed the charges and has been seeking political asylum in Israel, where he has lived for nearly two years. Mexican officials say that Zeron has connections to powerful Israeli companies that helped him flee Mexico.
Allegations against the former official also include the embezzlement of $50 million worth of state funds. While in office, Zeron is said to have authorised the purchase of tens of millions of dollars in surveillance systems from private Israeli intelligence firms including the notorious Pegasus software developed by Israel’s NSO Group. The software has been used to target journalists, lawyers and activists in several countries around the globe. It’s claimed that in some cases the intelligence gear purchased by Zeron were never delivered.
Mexico has demanded the extradition of Zeron. Israel however has not acted on either the extradition request or the asylum claims and is said to be looking for ways to squeeze diplomatic concessions out of the highly sensitive case.
Senior Israeli officials were cited in the New York Times saying that Zeron’s extradition case was being slow-walked as “tit-for-tat diplomacy” against Mexico, which has supported United Nations inquiries into allegations of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians. “Why would we help Mexico?” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to offer a candid view of a diplomatic dispute.
The senior Israeli official said that the current Mexican government has repeatedly supported resolutions criticising Israel at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, including decisions to investigate Israel’s killing of Palestinian protesters in Gaza in 2018 and the killing of civilians in the besieged enclave during the occupation state’s latest onslaught.
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By Johnny Vedmore |
Unlimited Hangout| October 1, 2020
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