Meta, Facebook's parent company, has warned 50,000 Facebook and Instagram users that their accounts were being spied on by hired intelligence.
According to Meta, there are seven companies that spy on 50 thousand Facebook and Instagram users, and these victims are spread in more than 100 countries, as Meta wrote on their newsroom page.
The targets are journalists, opposition parties, parties who often criticize the government, families from the opposition, and human rights activists. This spying action was discovered after Meta investigated for a month, and they immediately deleted the accounts associated with the spy company.
"This company is part of a vast industry that provides intrusive software and spy services to all of its consumers indiscriminately -- regardless of who they are targeting or what human rights violations may be," wrote David Agranovich Mike Dvilyanski, director of threat disruption Meta and head of cyber espionage investigations Meta, on that page.
"The industry is democratizing this threat, making it available to governments or bodies other than government that previously could not have had this capability," Agranovic added.
The report also mentions the names of six of the seven companies involved, while the remaining one remains anonymous. Four of the seven companies are Cobwebs Technologies, Cognyte, Black Cube, and Bluehawk CI, and they are based in Israel. The remaining three are based in China, India and North Macedonia.
One of these companies, Black Cube, describes itself as a litigation support company that uses investigative methods that follow local laws in each jurisdiction in which they operate.
Black Cube was previously used by Harvey Weinstein's service to try to block an article from the New York Times that sparked the #MeToo action. Reportedly, this Black Cube has many employees who previously worked for Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency.
