Meta and Google maintain pressure on the private cyber surveillance market

Meta announced on Wednesday February 14 that it had taken action against some private companies in the surveillance sector, a week after the publication of a similar report from Google, a sign of pressure placed by web giants on the controversial industry. The group explains, among other things, it has taken down a network of fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram, some of which were used to phish the targets of various clients of these companies, for example, by leading them to click on malicious links that could trigger the installation. is No ‘spyware.

One of these private companies, called IPS Intelligence and operating in Italy, had a network of fake accounts in numerous countries, including France, to vacuum up user data from Facebook and Instagram. Another Italian company, RCS Labs, also runs profiles on the group’s social networks, this time to pass itself off. “Young women, journalists or demonstrators” and send malicious links to the company’s customer targets.

This includes journalists and political dissidents in Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, Meta explained in its report. The group also presented technical measures implemented to limit messaging security vulnerabilities, particularly targeted by the surveillance sector, the owner of WhatsApp. According to Meta, some identified accounts were also used to test the surveillance companies’ products.

Political espionage

The report, the third in three years that Meta has published on the surveillance industry, also comes a week after Google published a fifty-page study on the sector. Thanks to the popularity of the Android operating system and Google products (such as Gmail messaging), the Californian company also has significant visibility on abuses in the sector for more than ten years of supplying authorities worldwide. Spying on journalists, protesters and other members of civil society.

According to Google, the “Monopoly” Governments are crumbling over exploiting security vulnerabilities. In 2023, the company’s analysis teams discovered twenty-five so-called “zero day” flaws – that is, those previously unknown to manufacturers and researchers – exploited by actors and hackers. “Twenty of them were used by private surveillance sellers”

Refers to huge.

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