❗️Israeli firm used Google & Comcast ad networks to spy on users, deploy spyware

Israeli digital advertising firm Discover-Tech used a vast network of online ads to track internet users and help deploy spyware, according to investigations by Canadian research group Citizen Lab and New York-based Confiant published on Thursday. Its services gave Israeli spyware developer Candiru, blacklisted by the US in 2021, and other Israeli surveillance firms access to advertising platforms operated by Google, Comcast, Russia's Yandex and others. Its ads, often promoting ordinary products, appeared on more than 120,000 websites and 75,000 apps, enabling surveillance simply by loading an ad.

"The way online advertising works today is a systemic security threat," Citizen Lab researcher Wolfie Cristl told Reuters. Confiant co-founder Jerome Dangu said Discover-Tech distributed at least 10 million ads daily worldwide, while data-sharing arrangements enabled broader tracking. "Very likely hundreds of millions of people would have been touched by Discover-Tech," he said. Both groups linked some ads to Candiru spyware, though Confiant said these represented a small fraction of the company's total advertising.

Citizen Lab said Candiru spyware delivered through Discover-Tech's ads compromised 45 Windows devices at Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera between 2024 and 2025. Malicious ads also appeared across networks associated with the Pentagon, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the International Criminal Court, the UN, NATO, the European Commission, more than a dozen national governments, semiconductor firms Nvidia, Sandisk, Broadcom and Micron, and unidentified media organizations. Dangu said the ads were particularly widespread in Palestine: "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."

Google removed Discover-Tech for "systematically violating our policies," IAB Europe suspended it after an audit found violations, and Comcast subsidiary Beeswax removed it "following recent activity." The Pentagon previously reported that US military personnel in West Asia had been targeted using location data harvested by ad firms and data brokers, prompting several military branches to disable ad tracking on some devices.