from the cut-and-run dept
QuaDream, an NSO-alike with links to Israeli intelligence services, first made international headlines last year. And for the worst reasons. An investigation found QuaDream (much like NSO Group) sold iPhone-targeting malware to human rights violators. These sales were given a layer of plausible deniability, handled by a Cyprus-based company on behalf of QuaDream as it collected paychecks from garbage governments around the world.
Further investigations by Toronto’s Citizen Lab uncovered QuaDream’s links to abusive governments, as well as abusive deployments of its zero-click exploit to target journalists, activists, political opponents, and dissidents.
Now that it’s inadvertently shown its whole ass to the world, it appears QuaDream is shuttering its malware business. Or at least, it wants all of its critics to believe that’s what it’s doing. But this report from the Jerusalem Post indicates that, real or otherwise, QuaDream’s latest business move involves laying off several actual human beings.
Israeli cybersecurity company QuaDream reportedly summoned many of its 40 employees to a pre-termination hearing on Monday ahead of widespread layoffs, according to Globes.
This downturn (and its unfortunate effect on 40 QuaDream employees) is being blamed on everything but the company’s decision to sell to human rights abusers, engage in zero oversight of its products’ deployment, and it’s willingness to engage in ethically awful business practices.
QuaDream, which can only access iPhones (unlike NSO, which can also hack Android phones), wrote in a letter to court: “The crisis in the industry began due to the public disclosure of the activities of some of the companies from 2018 onward, which resulted in the fact that in November 2011, the US Chamber of Commerce put NSO and Candiru on its blacklist. Immediately after that, at the start of 2022, the regulator in Israel decided to reduce the number of countries to which it is allowed to sell the companies’ products in the industry from 102 to only 37, which caused a severe economic crisis in the entire industry.”
When you’re blaming a government for harming your business by preventing you from selling to some of the worst governments on the planet, you’re really just saying your company might still be in the black if people would stop pointing out you’re enabling the worst impulses of autocrats and UN rejects.
If there’s an “economic crisis,” it’s of QuaDream’s and its compatriots’ own making. They didn’t have to sell to the worst governments in the world. No one compelled them to act as enablers for the targeting of government critics and opposition leaders. These companies had plenty of legitimate governments seeking to acquire phone-targeting tools for use in counterterrorism and serious criminal investigations.
But somehow their customer lists always included abusive governments that engage in horrendous human rights violations on the regular — ones these Israel-based companies should have steered clear of if for no other reason than they were handing powerful tools to powerful nation states that have spent years treating Israel as an interloper in its own country and its national religion as something to be reviled, if not actually extinguished.
If QuaDream is really getting out of the malware business, then that will be one less accomplice to human misery on the planet. But there’s no reason to believe this is the end of QuaDream and its willingness to sell to the worst of the worst. At some point, the press heat will die down and QuaDream’s principals (who have no principles) will rise from the self-imposed ashes to pitch malware to malicious governments. But this time they’ll take more steps to distance themselves from their actions and their unseemly benefactors.
The market for malware remains healthy and extremely lucrative. It’s not going away just because of an opportunistic culling of one company’s workforce.
Filed Under: hacking, malware, surveillance
Companies: quadream
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