Israeli hackers flock to Barcelona as spyware industry shifts

An investigation by the Israeli newspaper 'Haaretz' reveals the transfer to the Catalan capital in the last year of at least three teams of companies specialized in finding mobile and computer vulnerabilitiesHow Israel has become the Silicon Valley of cyber surveillance Barcelona has become the new base of operations of Israeli hacker teams.This has been revealed by an investigation by the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, which has identified at least…

Israeli hackers flock to Barcelona as spyware industry shifts

Squeezed between the war and tough restrictions at home, elite Israeli hackers are relocating to the EU and Spain to set up or join a new crop of firms selling exploit, now the hottest item in the world of cyber surveillance

Half of the hacking industry from Israel, which mostly sells to states, is said to have settled in Catalonia. One reason could be the restrictive and politically motivated export policy.

The Israeli media ‘Haaretz’ claims that a team of hackers from this country arrived in Barcelona from Singapore recently. Previously they were in BlueOcean, an offensive cybersecurity company based in Singapore and owned by a former Israeli Air Force officer. Another team, led by the first researcher of the NSO Group, who helped develop the original versions of the spy ‘software’ Pegasus, moved to Spain more than a year ago.tags: cybersecurity, …

“As a society, we have no certainty that these tools have stopped being used; let's think about the demonstrations against the price of rents, the demonstrations in Valencia... do we have any certainty that these tools are not being used to spy on the organizers of these demonstrations?”, researcher Elies Campo asked himself in a recent interview.

“Capital of Europe’s cyber-offensive.” This is how the Israeli media Haaretz described Barcelona in an article in which he states that in recent times there is a growing trend among Israel’s hackers to move to Barcelona. In the report, an industry executive states that “there are approximately six groups of Israelis of this kind who are the elite in the countryside, and half of them have moved to Spain.” In that news report, they say that Israel…