United States – The US administration unveiled the so-called “first-of-its-kind” sanctions package on Tuesday morning against Greece-based spyware vendor Intellexa and key individuals of the company due to their involvement in the connection of US officials with them.
The United States Treasury Department sanctioned two individuals and five entities linked to Intellexa Consortium for having “created, operated, and distributed software with the aim of spying,” which the US government alleges was used against journalists, dissidents, policy experts, and US personnel, as reported by Reuters.
Unprecedented Sanctions
The sanctions are crystallized by freezing any US assets belonging to those targeted and generally prohibiting Americans from dealing with them. Americans also risk being sanctioned because they engage in any dealings with them. Moreover, the company had already faced trade remedies under the Department of Commerce provisions enacted in July 2023.
The announcement on Tuesday was the first time the authority had penalized a private firm that operated a surveillance company.
Global Reach of Intellexa
Intellexa is a firm for cyber security known worldwide after they were mentioned in the media when the information about their software, for example, Predator, which gives the possibility to conduct surveillance from mobile phones and the Internet networks, was accidentally caught on the devices of the victims in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the United States.
Among other things, the parent company Intellexa owns and funds other surveillance companies and, according to separate analysts, maintains consortium agreements with them.
“Once a device is infected by the Predator spyware, the spyware can be leveraged for a variety of information stealing and surveillance capabilities—this includes the unauthorized extraction of data, geolocation tracking, and access to a variety of applications and personal information on the compromised device,” Treasury Department officials described in a statement.
Tal Dillian
The sanctions that are intended to hit the founder of Intellexa, one of the targets, Tal Dillian, he did not get the moment I asked him to comment.
Dillian, a one-time Israeli intelligence official, founded the company in early 2020 in Israel, but it soon branched out into Cyprus and Greece, where the export control of surveillance technologies is less developed than in some other countries. In recent years, the company’s operations were deplored, allegedly by the Egyptian Government and Vietnam, by security researchers and press reports.
Global Advocacy for Control
In 2023, a team of investigative news organizations revealed that the Vietnamese Government was aiming to implant spyware in some phones of US politicians using the tools developed by Intellexa. The exact event coincided with the moment that Washington and Hanoi were working on a bilateral agreement destined for diplomatic cooperation to restrain China’s influence in the Southeast Asia region, as per the Washington Post.
Civil society coalitions have been vociferous for years during an array of presidential administrations for states to stem the menace. In 2023, the Biden administration became the first to prioritize the control of commercial hacking tools through the Executive Order, which was aimed at introducing new controls, as reported by Reuters.
“The United States remains focused on establishing clear guardrails for the responsible development and use of these technologies while also ensuring the protection of human rights and civil liberties of individuals around the world,” said Under Secretary of the Treasury for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Brian Nelson.