An Israel-based commercial spyware company whose iPhone hacking technology is believed to be used by governments to compromise the phones of political opponents and journalists is being shut down.

The Israeli media news comes after the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab and Microsoft released reports last week about the company, its technology and the alleged victims.

The Israeli newspaper hairnet said QuaDream summoned its employees for a preliminary hearing on Sunday. The company has suffered significant downsizing and even lost entire teams to competitors as Israel continues to restrict sales of local spyware under US pressure, the report said. CTech claims that the reports from Microsoft and Citizen Lab were “the last nail in his coffin”.

After CTechQuaDream hasn’t been fully active “for a while” and is said to only have two employees in its offices whose job it is to look after computers and other equipment.

QuaDream was founded in Israel but sold to Saudi Arabia, he says hairnet.

Commercial spyware companies such as QuaDream and Israel’s NSO Group have been criticized for several years – notably by Citizen Lab – for selling technology to authoritarian and other governments that do not respect civil liberties.

Last year, a Citizen Lab researcher testified before the US Congress on curbing US government use of spyware.

Last month, US President Joe Biden issued an executive order barring federal agencies from using commercial spyware unless they had White House approval. The following day, several countries, including Canada, Australia, Costa Rica, Denmark, France, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, pledged to put in place “robust safeguards and procedures” to ensure no commercial spyware from them Governments upholds respect for universal human rights, the rule of law, civil rights and civil liberties.

In its report, Microsoft said that samples it collected showed malware from QuaDream (called KingsPawn by Microsoft) exploiting a flaw in Apple’s iOS 14 operating system. The malware is believed to be delivered through QuaDream’s Reign platform, which sells it to customers.

In its report, Citizen Lab said that through internet scanning it believed those customers were located in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Ghana, Israel, Mexico, Romania, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Uzbekistan.

Citizen Lab has identified at least five victims in North America, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe and the Middle East. Among the victims are journalists, opposition politicians and an employee of a non-governmental organization (NGO).

For the original article see IT world Canadaa sister publication of computer science direction.

French adaptation and translation by Renaud Larue-Langlois.