Israeli firm used online ads to run vast spy op

WASHINGTON:

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 said on Thursday.

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 separatereports 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 Christl, a senior researcher at Citizen Lab, told 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 earbuds - reached more than 120,000 websites and 75,000 apps through its various partnerships, Citizen Lab said.

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 said. 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 said, though Confiant said that ads it tied to Candiru were a tiny fraction of Discover-Tech's overall volume.