Israeli spyware vendor QuaDream is allegedly shutting down its operations in the coming days, less than a week after its hacking toolset was exposed by Citizen Lab and Microsoft.
The development was reported by the Israeli business newspaper Calcalist, citing unnamed sources, adding the company “hasn’t been fully active for a while” and that it “has been in a difficult situation for several months.”
Microsoft described REIGN as a “suite of exploits, malware, and infrastructure designed to exfiltrate data from mobile devices.”
The attacks entailed the exploitation of a now-patched flaw in iOS to deploy sophisticated surveillanceware capable of surreptitiously gathering sensitive information, including audio, pictures, passwords, files, and locations.
QuaDream, like its Israeli counterparts NSO Group and Candiru, is a private-sector offensive actor (PSOA) that markets end-to-end hacking tools for use by its customers to run their targeted cyber operations.
Then last year, Reuters revealed that QuaDream had independently developed an exploit to break into iPhones that’s comparable to the one provided by NSO Group by leveraging a flaw in iMessage. Apple addressed the vulnerability in September 2021.
The upcoming closure also comes a little over a month after Haaretz shed light on a previously unknown Israeli cyber mercenary company called NFV Systems for selling its surveillance technologies to foreign countries without obtaining a license from the Ministry of Defense.
Source: https://thehackernews.com/
