The image is by Alex Castro.
The parent company of Facebook has warned 50,000 users that their accounts were spied on by commercial espionage-for-hire schemes around the globe.
The users were targeted by seven entities and located in more than 100 countries according to an update posted on Meta's news page today.
The post said that the targets included journalists, dissidents, critics of authoritarian regimes, families of opposition, and human rights activists. The Meta platform was removed from from the spy groups that were uncovered in the monthslong investigation.
David Agranovich, Meta's director of threat disruption, wrote that the companies are part of a large industry that provides intrusive software tools and surveillance services indiscriminately to any customer, regardless of who they target or the human rights abuses they might enable. This industry makes these threats available to government and non-government groups that otherwise wouldn't have these capabilities.
A threat report released by Meta named six out of seven companies, and one of them was unknown. Four of the seven are based in Israel, with the other three in China, India, and North Macedonia.
In a statement provided to NPR, Black Cube said it was a litigation support firm that used investigation methods compliant with local laws. Black Cube was once employed by Harvey Weinstein to try to stop the publication of a New York Times article.
The disclosure by Facebook of actions it has taken to disrupt and remove seven private firms from its platform makes it clear that more must be done to stop this mercenary marketplace. These companies pose a threat to human rights by enabling indiscriminate surveillance against journalists and political dissidents.
Apple and Meta sued the Israeli company NSO Group last month, accusing them of selling software that was used to compromise the phones. The NSO Group developed a zero click exploit that can be used to hack targets phones just by sending a message, and the researchers at the search engine company published details of the exploit yesterday.
The company was blacklisted by the US government for selling software that was used to spy on journalists. A group of lawmakers, including Adam Schiff, have called for harsher sanctions on a group of companies, including NSO Group, that they said would prevent employees from traveling to the United States.
