An Israeli advertising agency used its massive ad network to spy on users and pass their information off to a spyware company blacklisted in the United States, according to reports.
Digital advertising agency, Discover-Tech, granted Israeli surveillance groups, including blacklisted firm Candiru access to advertising platforms on Google, Comcast, Russia’s Yandex, and other search engines, according to reports released Thursday by New York advertising security firm Confiant and Canada-based cyber watchdog group, Citizen Lab. Discover-Tech’s ads were used to track targets and even help hack into their devices, the reports indicate.
In 2021, Candiru was blacklisted in America by the Department of Commerce because it “supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers.”
Discover-Tech utilized a platform called Controlium that enables its partner spyware firms to de-anonymize, fingerprint and automatically infect a device as an advertisement renders on the page — meaning a user does not even have to click the ad to be hacked, Citizen Lab reported.
Discover-Tech did not respond to inquiries left on its comment forum. The founder, Dekel Boni did not reply to a LinkedIn message sent by the DCNF.
Neither Confiant nor Citizen Lab responded to a request for comment.
Over the course of four months the agency’s advertisements were shown on nearly 200,000 unique websites and Android/iOS apps in dozens of countries. “Very likely hundreds of millions of people would have been touched by Discover-Tech,” Confiant cofounder, Jerome Dangu, told Reuters.
In America, “hundreds of networks in sensitive categories including the Pentagon, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and the International Criminal Court” were targeted by malicious advertisements generated by Discover-Tech, Dangu said, according to Reuters.
The Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) did not immediately respond when the DCNF inquired about the extent in which this spyware compromised American infrastructure.
Similar ads were shown to people in the United Nations, NATO, the European Commission, and more than a dozen other national governments. Candiru spyware, delivered by Discover-Tech, also compromised 45 Windows devices at Al-Jazeera between 2024 and 2025, Dangu told Reuters.
Discover-Tech is now being boxed out of parts of the online advertising market. Google, Comcast, and Europe’s IAB have all removed it from their platforms, Reuters reported.
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