Researchers say Israeli ad firm DiscoverTech helped spyware firm target Al Jazeera

Mixed · 2Citizen Lab, a University of Toronto research group, and the New York ad-security firm Confiant said on Thursday 15 October 2026 that the Israeli advertising company DiscoverTech used its online ad network to help spyware developers track and hack targets. 1 2 Mixed · 2Citizen Lab said a powerful form of spyware from the Israeli firm Candiru, delivered through DiscoverTech's ads, compromised 45 Windows devices at the Qatari broadcaster Al Jazeera in 2024 and 2025. 2 1 Mixed · 2Researchers said Al Jazeera shared its network logs, which they used to reconstruct the attacks. NBC News described the malware as "no-click" spyware: a victim only had to visit a website with a vulnerable computer and see the ad. Reuters likewise reported that ads only needed to load for the spying to occur. 1 2

Left · 1According to NBC News, the report says DiscoverTech secretly ran a program called Controlium. It let spyware companies pick people to infect or profile by advertising ID, browser identifier or IP address. Researchers said they found its source code on DiscoverTech's login pages. 1 Mixed · 2The reach is large. Citizen Lab said DiscoverTech's ads, often for ordinary products such as phones or earpods, reached more than 120,000 websites and 75,000 apps. Confiant's cofounder Jerome Dangu said the firm served at least 10 million ads a day and used cookie matching to track people beyond its own ads. He said "very likely hundreds of millions of people" were touched. 1 2 Mixed · 2Dangu said the malicious ads appeared in "hundreds of networks in sensitive categories", including the Pentagon, the International Atomic Energy Agency and the International Criminal Court, and that the Palestinian territories were particularly saturated. Citizen Lab said it had similar evidence for the UN, NATO, the European Commission and more than a dozen national governments. NBC noted the report stresses that seeing ads on a network does not mean that organisation was targeted. 2 1

Right · 1Reuters reported that Confiant said the ads it tied to Candiru were a tiny fraction of DiscoverTech's overall volume. Citizen Lab said it also identified a couple of other surveillance vendors, and that the firm's exposed authentication logs showed logins from IP addresses in Israel, Europe and the Gulf. 2 Mixed · 2Candiru now operates as Integrity Labs. The US Commerce Department put it on its Entity List in 2021, saying its software was used to target journalists, activists and officials. Reuters could not reach Candiru's owners. 1 2 Mixed · 2Platforms have acted against DiscoverTech. Google said it helped the investigation and banned the firm "for systematically violating our policies". IAB Europe said it suspended DiscoverTech last week after an audit found policy violations, and Comcast's Beeswax removed it. NBC reported that Vungle and Eskimi also disconnected it. Yandex did not respond to Reuters. 2 1

Mixed · 2DiscoverTech, founded in 2020, did not respond to either outlet, and neither did its CEO, Dekel Boni, who Reuters named. Al Jazeera did not respond to requests for comment. 2 1 Mixed · 2Context: NBC says Citizen Lab previously reported that 36 Al Jazeera journalists and staff had been hacked with NSO Group's Pegasus, most likely by operators linked to Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Researchers say the new findings show advertising can be a route for hacking. Wolfie Christl of Citizen Lab (spelled "Cristl" by Reuters) called ad blocking a cybersecurity best practice and said it may not protect consistently. Natalia Krapiva of Access Now called for urgent technical, legal and regulatory measures. 1 2 Right · 2Reuters copy carried by the Jerusalem Post and Arab News adds that the ads also appeared in networks of chip firms such as Nvidia, Sandisk, Broadcom and Micron and in unnamed media organisations in Mexico, Israel and Europe, and that the Pentagon said earlier this year that US forces in war zones had been targeted using location data harvested by ad tech firms and data brokers. 3 4