Israeli advertising agency uses online ads to spy on internet users, hack devices

An Israeli digital advertising company used a vast network of online advertisements to track targets and help deliver spyware to hack their devices, according to two cybersecurity research groups.

Discover-Tech’s advertising network reached more than 120,000 websites and 75,000 applications, often displaying seemingly harmless promotions for products such as mobile phones and earpods, researchers at Canada’s Citizen Lab said on Thursday.

Investigations by Citizen Lab and New York-based advertising security firm Confiant found that the company’s connections to major advertising platforms provided a route for Israeli spyware maker Candiru and other surveillance firms to reach potential targets.

The findings raise concerns that advertising systems designed to deliver personalised promotions can also be exploited to monitor people’s online activity and facilitate cyberattacks.

According to the researchers, Discover-Tech could identify and follow people who visited websites or used applications carrying its advertisements. In some cases, the company allegedly attempted to obtain smartphone users’ phone numbers.

The tracking could take place simply when an advertisement loaded on a website, the researchers said, without requiring users to click on it.

Some advertisements were also linked to attempts to install Candiru spyware on targeted devices, both investigations found. Confiant said, however, that the advertisements it associated with Candiru accounted for only a small proportion of Discover-Tech’s overall advertising activity.

Confiant co-founder Jerome Dangu estimated that Discover-Tech distributed at least 10 million advertisements daily worldwide. He said data-sharing arrangements known as cookie matching could allow the company to track users beyond the websites where its advertisements appeared.

Dangu estimated that hundreds of millions of people may have been exposed to the company’s network.