How did the most dangerous spy company in the world manage to operate in secret for years? | technology

In recent years, the espionage industry has flourished widely, with the development of technical devices and their various uses, and this coincided with the emergence of the name of a group of companies that made this sector their source of livelihood.

Perhaps the Israeli “NSO” is the developer of the “Pegasus“The malware – which was used to spy on many prominent figures, including a journalist Jamal Khashoggi As stated in a report by Mother Jones, one of the most prominent of these companies.

This does not mean that it is the only company operating in this sector, as there are many companies that make their home in the espionage sector, including a company that remained unknown until recently, but its danger exceeds the danger posed by NSO.

This unknown company was able to track the phones of many prominent figures around the world and from various sectors, and this tracking was not based on a loophole that could be closed in the phones or even malicious messages that penetrate the phones, as it was done without any intervention from the victim, whether to click on a link or download any application.

Within 7 years, First Wap was able to conduct more than a million tracking and spying operations on a group of personalities, whether prominent or not, starting with scientists.Google” In various sectors and even the wife of Sergey Brin, the company’s founder, and health coaches in Hawaii.

Who is FirstWap? How did you manage to hide in the shadows until today?

A shroud of secrecy and legal loopholes

Mother Jones, in cooperation with a group of journalistic sites – including Lighthouse Reports – conducted a year-and-a-half investigation during which it was able to reveal many of the secrets of FirstApp and its involvement in espionage and tracking operations superior to those whose secrets were revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013.

The site’s report included an undercover visit by a group of journalists to one of the most prominent conferences of security companies held this year, specifically in Prague, which is the “ISS World Training” conference, where many workers in the security and surveillance sector meet, whether they are from government agencies or private companies.

The press team there spoke with Gunter Rudolf, the company’s chief salesman, as well as a group of other executives of the company, and the conversation revolved around the capabilities of the Altamides system for spying and tracking phones, as Rudolf confirmed that the system is capable of tracking the movement of mobile phones within any country in the world and even hacking them. Whatsapp Without user intervention.

But Rudolph expressed a problem with the deal that could connect Altamides to its potential customers, as he and a large number of the company’s employees hold European nationalities, so selling spy technology to foreign countries or even participating in the distance selling process puts them under the penalty of the law.

Rudolph added that his company has a solution, as the deal contracts are signed in Jakarta, which has lenient laws regarding the sale of surveillance technologies, and the signatory to the deal will be the Indian director present in the company, and in this way the company avoids any legal challenges.

Later, FirstApp denied this conversation, and said that journalists misunderstood Rudolph’s statements, and that he was only talking about the technical capabilities of their system.

The company also denies that it deals with any party except the governments of countries that have appropriate legal and logical justifications for using such technologies, and its role ends after the system is installed in the target country and has no relation to any type of use later.

Through these legal loopholes, the company was able to avoid falling foul of the law and being exposed to penalties and legal and journalistic investigations similar to those faced by NSO, as an example, in recent years.

It is noteworthy that the company “First Wap” was founded for the first time in 1999 by Swedish national Joseph Fox, who was working in Jakarta at the time.

Switching from working in marketing to spying on customers

The Mother Jones report indicates that the company began its journey as a marketing company that used mobile phone networks to send marketing messages to users’ phones in various parts of the world, but FirstApp’s transformation from being a mere marketing company to tracking customers took place later.

This is because one of the authorities – whose name was not mentioned in the report – asked the company to develop a system used to combat terrorism and capable of tracking terrorists and users around the world, and within several years the product requested by the authority did not exist.

While the company clearly and frankly confirms that it only deals with government agencies within the narrowest limits and in the case of a set of strict conditions and restrictions, the data revealed in the report and the interviews it conducted with some of the company’s former employees confirm the opposite.

The mechanism of operation of the “Altamides” system relies simply on collecting data on mobile phones and their locations through communication towers located near them, even if these towers are in a foreign country and anywhere in the world, without the need to access the Internet service provider or the communication network that is being used.

This means that an agent in the United States is able to track the location of a victim in Southeast Asia without leaving his home or obtaining the necessary permits from telecommunications companies. One of the company’s former employees described what it is doing as “premature,” even though he left it at the beginning of this century.

A diverse constellation of victims

The Mother Jones report refers to a large and diverse group of victims against whom Altamides was used, even though the documents that reached the site were for the period between 2007 and 2014 only.

The list of victims includes a number of prominent names and personalities, such as the famous actor Jared Leto, whose phone was tracked 4 times in 2012, as well as Anne Wojcicki, founder of the DNA testing company, who later married Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, and was tracked more than a thousand times in 2009.

The list also included a group of figures in the Arab world, such as Asma al-Assad, wife of ousted Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, as her phone was tracked more than 5 times in 2013.

The report indicates that the system was used to track David Patenga, the nephew of dissident Rwandan intelligence chief Patrick Karegeya, who was assassinated at the Michelangelo Towers Hotel in Johannesburg in 2014.

Likewise, the Qatari Prime Minister in 2013, as the report showed 18 attempts to trace a phone linked to Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabr Al Thani, who was serving as the Qatari Prime Minister at the time.

A disaster beyond measure

Ron Deibert, director of Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, describes what FirstApp is doing as enabling a group of the world’s worst tyrants and autocrats to undermine the basic pillars of democracy, in his interview with the Mother Jones website.

Citizen Lab represents one of the bastions of defending freedom in the world, and it played a major role in exposing the efforts made by NSO and the malicious Pegasus software to spy on users.

He adds, “You have a company that was able to operate in the shadows without any public accountability or transparency,” which increases the risk of what the company is doing, as well as its list of clients in which there are no red lines, according to statements made by former company employees to the website.