Attack on 45 Al Jazeera devices as Israeli firm spread spyware behind adverts
Photo: Collected
The Israeli digital advertising agency ‘Discover-Tech’ has carried out espionage on various individuals and organisations across the world using an extensive network of online advertisements. The company also helped in illegally entering, or hacking, the devices of various users.
This information has come to the fore in two separate reports by Citizen Lab, the Canada-based research organisation on cyber surveillance, and Confiant, a New York advertising security firm.
According to the researchers, Discover-Tech, founded in 2020, gave several surveillance organisations, including the US government-blacklisted Israeli spyware maker ‘Candiru’, the opportunity to run their operations on various online platforms. They used to carry out this espionage using platforms such as Google, Comcast and Russia’s Yandex.
Discover-Tech used to run about 10 million (1 crore) or more advertisements across the world every day. These harmful advertisements were usually spread across more than 1,20,000 websites and 75,000 apps behind attractive advertisements for ordinary products such as mobile phones or earbuds.
Simply loading these harmful advertisements on a website or app made it possible to track or identify users’ devices. In many cases the phone numbers and personal information of smartphone users were also harvested, and through some advertisements Candiru’s powerful spyware was installed on the user’s device.
The research found that the scope of Discover-Tech’s spyware campaign had spread even to highly sensitive networks across the world. Between 2024 and 2025, cyber attacks were carried out with Candiru spyware through Discover-Tech’s advertisements on about 45 Windows devices of the Qatari news outlet Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera has condemned the cyber attack and demanded accountability of those responsible.
Confiant co-founder Jerome Dangu said their advertisements had also been displayed on the websites of institutions such as the Pentagon, the US defence department, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). Besides, by spreading this Israeli firm’s advertisements on almost every website in Palestine, all kinds of digital activity there were kept under surveillance.
Citizen Lab said these harmful advertisements had also reached the United Nations, NATO, the European Commission and the government networks of a dozen countries. World-renowned chip making companies such as Nvidia, SanDisk and Broadcom, as well as leading media outlets in Mexico and Europe, were also targets.
After these research reports came to the fore, the banning and deactivation of Discover-Tech from the international online advertising market has begun. Google has already permanently expelled the company from its platform on charges of violating policy. Comcast’s subsidiary ‘Beeswax’ and the digital marketing organisation ‘IAB Europe’ have temporarily banned and cancelled the company from their approved lists.
Such covert surveillance through online advertising is currently being considered a major threat to national security. Earlier this year the Pentagon said evidence had been found that information on the locations of troops deployed on the battlefield could be tracked from advertising technology data; following which advertising tracking has also been disabled on a number of military devices.
