Facebook says mercenary spy firms affected 48,000 people – The National

Facebook owner Meta is calling out half a dozen private surveillance companies for hacking or other abuses, accusing them in a report published on Thursday of collectively affecting some 48,000 people across its platforms.The company’s fight with the spy firms comes amid a wider move by American tech companies, US politicians and President Joe Biden’s administration against purveyors of digital espionage services, notably the Israeli spyware company NSO Group.Meta is already suing NSO in the US. Nathaniel Gleicher, Meta’s head of security policy, told Reuters that Thursday’s crackdown was meant to signal that “the surveillance-for-hire industry is much broader than one company.”The Meta report said the company was suspending about 1,500 mostly fake accounts run by seven organisations across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta said users in more than 100 countries were affected.Meta did not provide a detailed explanation of how it identified the surveillance firms, but it operates some of the world’s biggest social and communications networks and regularly touts its ability to find and remove malicious actors from its platforms.Among them is Israeli intelligence firm Black Cube, which Meta said was building phantom personas to chat targets up online and gather their email addresses, “likely for later phishing…
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