While Facebook may have changed its name to Meta, many of the issues of its former incarnation remain. The latest incident involves “surveillance-for-hire” firms as the social media platform terms it, with a number having to be banned recently and several thousand users needing to be alerted.
Meta explained the situation in a blog post this week, highlighting the firms in question and the steps taken in order to make the platform a slightly less nefarious place to be. This included banning more than 1 000 companies adopting surveillance-for-hire tactics and alerting over 50 000 Meta users over potential spying.
“The global surveillance-for-hire industry targets people across the internet to collect intelligence, manipulate them into revealing information and compromise their devices and accounts. These companies are part of a sprawling 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,” noted David Agranovich, director of Threat Disruption and Mike Dvilyanski, head of Cyber Espionage Investigations.
“We observed three phases of targeting activity by these commercial players that make up their ‘surveillance chain’: Reconnaissance, Engagement and Exploitation. Each phase informs the next. While some of these entities specialize in one particular stage of surveillance, others support the entire attack chain,” the pair added.
As Engadget points out, some of the surveillance-for-hire firms identified include Cobwebs, Cognyte, Black Cube, Bluehawk CI, BelltroX and Cytrox, as well as an unknown entity operating out of China working on facial recognition software, which we have seen come to the fore recently in surveillance of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.
All of the above firms have been banned, but Black Cube has since proclaimed its innocence, issuing a statement to say that all its operations are above board.
A spokesperson for the company told Engadget that it, “does not undertake any phishing or hacking and does not operate in the cyber world. Black Cube obtains legal advice in every jurisdiction in which we operate in order to ensure that all our agents’ activities are fully compliant with local laws.”
This latest development serves as a reminder that every click you make online is being watched and a high level of caution should be observed.
[Image – Photo by Dima Solomin on Unsplash]
