The search engine giant said these five companies from Italy, Greece and Spain were “enabling the use of dangerous hacking tools”, and urged the United States and its allies to do more to combat the spyware industry (via Reuters).
Many of these businesses claim their products are for exclusive use by governments across the world for national security, but often the spyware tools are used to snoop on civil society. Not so long ago, the Israeli firm NSO’s Pegasus spyware made headlines after it became known it was used to spy on many people globally.
There are many more enterprises besides NSO that “help the proliferation of spy technology for malicious uses”, the report states. Researches from Google’s TAG threat-hunting team say:
Demand from government customers remains strong and our findings underscore the extent to which commercial spyware vendors have proliferated hacking and spyware capabilities that weaken the safety of the Internet for all. The private sector is now responsible for a significant portion of the most sophisticated tools we detect.
The companies that are accused of breaking into phones by bypassing the security measures in iOS and Android include the Italian firms Cy4Gate, RCS Labs and Negg Group, Greek company Intellexa and Spain’s Variston.
Negg Group’s website says the company is focused on cybersecurity, but Google said its software was found to have been used to spy on people in Italy, Malaysia, and Kazakhstan.
Variston made software that infected users’ phones via the browsers Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or iOS apps.
The five companies either did not respond to Reuters for comment or were not reachable.
