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 separate reports 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.

MALICIOUS ADS SHOWN IN HUNDREDS OF SENSITIVE NETWORKS

Confiant cofounder Jerome Dangu said Discover-Tech was pumping out at least ​10 million ads per day all around the world and that data-sharing arrangements — called cookie matching — allowed it to track people even beyond the reach of its advertisements.

“Very likely hundreds of millions of people would have been touched by Discover-Tech,” Dangu said.

Discover-Tech, which was founded in 2020, did not return messages left via its contact form. A LinkedIn message and emails sent to its chief executive, Dekel Boni, were not returned.

Reuters’ attempts to reach Candiru’s owners were similarly unsuccessful. The ​US Commerce Department blacklisted Candiru in 2021 for allegedly supplying spyware that was used to maliciously target government officials, journalists, activists and academics.

Citizen Lab said a powerful form of Candiru spyware delivered through Discover-Tech’s ads had ​been used to compromise 45 Windows devices at the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera between 2024 and 2025, something it said it was able to confirm because the media group had shared its network logs with the group.

In a ‌statement, Al Jazeera ⁠said it “condemns the spyware attacks targeting a number of its staff” and that it was taking steps to protect its employees and its systems. “Those responsible must be held accountable,” it said.

Dangu of Confiant said that the malicious ads had been shown to users in “hundreds of networks in sensitive categories,” including the Pentagon, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the International Criminal Court. He also said that some regions, like the Palestinian territories, were particularly saturated by the Israeli firm’s ads.

“You go to almost any site in Palestine — any site — you find a Discover-Tech ad. It gives them a very complete visibility on the digital activities of an ​entire country,” he said.

Citizen Lab also said it ​had similar evidence showing the malicious ads were ⁠shown to people in the United Nations, NATO, the European Commission, and more than a dozen national governments. Other networks the ads appeared in included chip-related firms such as Nvidia, Sandisk, Broadcom, and Micron, as well as several media organizations in Mexico, Israel, and Europe that were not identified.

In addition to identifying ​Candiru and a couple of other surveillance vendors, Citizen Lab said it was able to glean some details about where Discover-Tech’s users might be based ​because the firm inadvertently exposed ⁠its authentication logs to the internet, showing people logging in from internet protocol addresses in Israel, Europe, and the Gulf.

MEASURES AGAINST DISCOVER-TECH TAKEN

Discover-Tech is now being frozen out of parts of the online ad market.

Google said in a statement that it had collaborated with Citizen Lab and Confiant’s investigation and kicked Discover-Tech off its ad platforms “for systematically violating our policies.”

IAB Europe, the European-level association for the digital marketing and advertising ecosystem, said in an email ⁠that Discover-Tech had ​been suspended from its list of globally approved vendors last week after an audit identified policy violations.

Comcast ad tech subsidiary ​Beeswax removed Discover-Tech from its platform “following recent activity,” Comcast said in a statement. Yandex did not return Reuters messages seeking comment.

Advertising-driven surveillance is increasingly being seen as a national security threat. Earlier this year, the Pentagon said it had received reports that US ​forces deployed to war zones had been targeted using location data harvested by ad tech firms and data brokers. Branches of the military have since disabled ad tracking on some devices. (Reuters)

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Two men, including a UK immigration officer, have been found guilty of spying on politicians and pro-democracy activists on behalf of China.

Chung Biu (Bill) Yuen, 65, and Chi Leung (Peter) Wai, 40, were found to have violated the National Security Act by assisting a foreign intelligence.

Wai, who was a UK immigration officer, was also convicted of misusing his Border Force job to gain access to the interior ministry’s computer system.

The court heard both men — who were dual Chinese and UK citizens — posed as legitimate police or intelligence officers to conduct surveillance and gather information about Hong Kong pro-democracy supporters and others deemed “persons of interest”.

Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson told the court Yuen and Wai had been tasked to carry out “shadow policing operations” for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and ultimately China.

Wai worked as a UK Border Force officer, a volunteer officer for City of London Police and ran a private security company.

Yuen used to be a superintendent in the Hong Kong Police and was employed in London by the Hong Kong Economic Trade Office, the official overseas representative of Hong Kong’s government.

Prosecutors said Yuen’s work went beyond his job description as office manager of the trade office.

The court heard he helped gather intelligence for Hong Kong on pro-democracy activists and politicians who had moved to the UK in recent years after authorities introduced a wide-ranging national security law in the Asian financial hub.

Yuen assigned tasks to Wai, who then allegedly used police systems to gather information for his private work that was a cover for his spying.

Prosecutors said Wai was paid from a trade office account.

Phone messages showed the two conducted surveillance of former Hong Kong politician Nathan Law and that their interest extended beyond Hong Kong activists, who they referred to as “cockroaches.”

“They wanted to know where they were, where they live, what they are doing, who they are associating with, who they are communicating with and how they are doing that and those are the very things that these defendants were in the business of obtaining,” Prosecutor Duncan Atkinson said.

Yuen told Wai to pay special attention to members of parliament or government employees and in 2023 provided the name of prominent politicians, including Conservative UK politician Iain Duncan Smith, a co-chairman of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China.

The jury could not reach a verdict on a separate count relating to forcing entry into the northern England home of a woman accused of fraud in 2024.

A third man, Matthew Trickett, 37, was also accused of the same offences before his death after the trio were charged.

He was a former British Royal Marine who worked as an immigration officer and private investigator.

His death was not considered suspicious.

The Chinese Embassy in London has accused Britain of fabricating the charges against the two men.

London has repeatedly accused Beijing of espionage activities.

There have been tensions between the UK and China over a national security crackdown in Hong Kong that saw violent pro-democracy protests in 2019. (ABC News)

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