Following the exposure of QuaDream’s hacking tools by Citizen Lab and Microsoft last week, the Israeli spyware business is poised to shut operations in the coming days.
According to unnamed sources quoted by Calcalist, an Israeli business journal, the company “hasn’t been fully active for a while” and “has been in a difficult situation for several months.” The board of directors of QuaDream is apparently considering selling its intellectual property. QuaDream’s specialization is infecting Apple devices with “zero-click” assaults, which do not need the victim to take any action, and it has been used against journalists, political opposition leaders, and NGO workers all around the world.
REIGN, a spyware system developed by QuaDream, was recently disclosed as a collection of vulnerabilities, malware, and infrastructure designed to steal data from mobile devices, with assaults affecting North America, Central Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The malware took use of an iOS vulnerability, which has since been patched, to steal personal information such as audio, photos, passwords, files, and locations.
The sources for this piece include an article in TheHackerNews.
