The global surveillance-for-hire industry continues to grow and indiscriminately target people – including journalists, activists, litigants and political opposition – to collect intelligence, and manipulate and compromise their devices and accounts across the internet, said Meta in its report titled "Threat Report on the Surveillance-for-Hire Industry", released on December 15, 2022. This is their second report; the first report was published a year ago. Meta said it has been taking action against commercial spyware vendors (the surveillance-for-hire industry) around the world by disabling their accounts, blocking their infrastructure, and alerting people who were affected by them. Meta caught an Indian firm which was scamming users Meta removed a network of 40 accounts belonging to India-based CyberRoot Risk Advisory Private, who, among other things, would create fictitious accounts of journalists, business executives, and media personalities. They would even create nearly identical accounts of their friends and family members to make the account seem more real. As a part of their phishing, they would also steal the login information of users by creating spoofed web domains of services like Gmail, Zoom, and Facebook. The following image illustrates a Dropbox spoof domain created by the spyware vendor. [caption id="attachment_174571" align="aligncenter" width="751"] Source: Meta's Threat Report on the Surveillance-for-Hire Industry[/caption] Why it matters: Surveillance today is no longer limited only to the State. Private entities and even individuals have access to various free and paid online tools to conduct surveillance. They can even hire a private agency for this purpose. For instance, Social Links, a…
