On Monday, the federal government announced it was placing new sanctions on a commercial spyware company that a former military officer from Israel was in charge of.
The sanctions were put on Intellexa Consortium, which the federal government says ran programs that allowed people to easily access nearly any information that was stored on an individual’s smartphone.
Private researchers and key U.S. officials said the products the company made have been used by various mass surveillance campaigns that have been carried out across the globe.
This has allowed users to be able to obtain and track sensitive information from journalists, opposition figures, political candidates, dissidents and more.
The new penalties that have been handed down target one organization and five people who are connected to Intellexa, which is a network of companies based in Greece that has subsidiaries located in the British Virgin Islands, Ireland, Hungary and North Macedonia.
Government officials have said that the company developed and then sold a suite of spyware tools that they called Predator. These tools allowed people to enter into anyone’s device without them having to open an attachment or click on a link.
The program then granted people access to the smartphone’s microphone and camera as well as any files or data that was stored on it.
In a release, the acting undersecretary of the Treasury for terrorism and financial intelligence, Bradley Smith, said:
“The United States will not tolerate the reckless propagation of disruptive technologies that threatens our national security and undermines the privacy and civil liberties of our citizens.”
Earlier in the year, the Biden administration handed down sanctions against the founder of Intellexa, two of its employees and several other subsidiaries. The Department of Commerce blacklisted the company and one of its subsidiaries in 2023, which then denied them any access to U.S. technology.
All five people who are subject to these latest penalties all held senior positions at the company or one of its subsidiaries, federal government officials said.
In addition, The Aliada Group, a subsidiary in the British Virgin Islands, also had sanctions put on it regarding allegations that it enabled financial transactions for Intellexa that totaled into the tens of millions of dollars.
The company was founded back in 2019 by Tal Dilian, a former military officer for Israel. Earlier this year, he received penalties from the U.S. government along with Sara Hamou, who’s a corporate offshore specialist who provided Intellexa with managerial services.
Any organization or individual who’s sanctioned by the federal government are banned from engaging in financial or business transactions either in the United States or with any U.S. entity.
Last year, the Security Lab at Amnesty International issued a report that found the Predator program was used to target devices that were connected to the president of the European Parliament, the president of Taiwan, Republican Senator John Hoeven of North Dakota and Republican Representative Michael McCaul of Texas.
