Apple Sends Warning Across More than 80 Countries 

Google Reports Intellexa Spyware Targeting Several Hundred Accounts 

Also read: Sanctioned Spyware Vendor Used iOS Zero-Day Exploit Chain Against Egyptian Targets

Rising Scrutiny of Commercial Spyware 

Also read: Leaked Files Expose Intellexa’s Remote Access to Customer Systems and Live Surveillance Ops

Tech Firms Decline to Name Specific Attackers 

Intellexa staff members connected directly to at least 10 deployed Predator customer systems using TeamViewer commercial remote administration software, a leaked 2023 internal training session revealed. It exposed how the sanctioned mercenary spyware vendor retained privileged access to government surveillance operations including the ability to view live targeting data, infection attempts, and potentially access dashboards containing collected surveillance data from victims.

The "Intellexa Leaks" investigation published jointly by Inside Story, Haaretz, WAV Research Collective, and Amnesty International's Security Lab provides unprecedented visibility into internal operations of a commercial surveillance company whose Predator spyware has been linked to human rights abuses across countries.

The leaked materials, including internal documents, sales and marketing material, and training videos, expose how Intellexa operates despite US Treasury sanctions imposed in March 2024 and extensive public scrutiny from civil society and technology companies.

Direct Access to Ten Customer Systems

The TeamViewer control panel, briefly visible in the leaked training recording, showed at least 10 potential customers identified with code names including Dragon, Eagle, Falcon, Flamingo, Fox, Glen, Lion, Loco, Phoenix, and Rhino, plus one apparent Predator demo system. The visible customers represented only those through the letter F alphabetically, suggesting additional deployments beyond those shown.

Internal Intellexa business records show the company purchased seven TeamViewer licenses in June 2021, indicating remote management of deployed customer Predator systems began at least two years before the video was recorded. Amnesty International's infrastructure mapping in September 2021 found seven likely active Predator customers, consistent with the purchased license count.

When a staff member asked if they were connecting to a testing environment, the instructor stated they were accessing a live "customer environment." The video shows staff initiating remote connections without indication that customers or government end-users reviewed or approved specific connection requests.

Also read: Sanctioned Spyware Vendor Used iOS Zero-Day Exploit Chain Against Egyptian Targets

Visibility Into Live Targeting Operations

For 30 minutes, the video shows an Intellexa staff member browsing an Elasticsearch analytics dashboard displaying logs and analytics from various Predator system components assigned to a specific customer with codename EAGLE_2. The dashboard included logs from both on-premises backend systems and online systems on the public internet, containing both live and historical data.

The logging dashboard revealed live Predator infection attempts against real targets. Detailed information from at least one infection attempt against a target in Kazakhstan showed the infection URL, target's IP address, and software versions of the target's phone, though the attempt apparently failed.

Data visible in the log dashboard indicated that logs from other internal Predator backend system components were also accessible, including those storing targeting information and collected surveillance data.

Access to Customer Dashboard and Surveillance Data

During the training, the instructor switched windows on the remote Ubuntu desktop, revealing other open applications including a Chrome browser window displaying a login prompt for a system hosted at https://pds[.]my[.]admin:8884. The username "cyop" was prefilled, indicating the remote computer used by Intellexa staff had previously logged into the PDS system.

Amnesty International concluded the login prompt shown in the training video provides access to a customer's Predator dashboard—the main control panel used by customers to conduct surveillance operations including adding targets, creating new infection links, and viewing surveillance data collected from victims.

The customer targeting dashboard is referred to in internal Intellexa documentation by various names including Predator Delivery Studio, Helios Delivery Studio, and the Cyber Operations Platform. Both terms PDS and CyOP appear in the URL and username field from the training video.

The remote desktop system used by Intellexa support staff could connect to the Predator dashboard, raising alarming questions about compartmentalization of live surveillance data and targeting from the company and its staff. The video suggests Intellexa staff retained privileged network access to the most sensitive parts of the Predator system, including storage containing photos, messages, and all surveillance data gathered from victims.

New Predator Attack in Pakistan

Ongoing forensic investigations independent of the leaks, found new evidence that Predator spyware is being actively used in Pakistan. In summer 2025, a human rights lawyer from Pakistan's Balochistan province received a malicious link over WhatsApp from an unknown number.

Amnesty International's Security Lab attributed the link to a Predator attack attempt based on technical behavior of the infection server and specific characteristics of the one-time infection link consistent with previously observed Predator 1-click links. This represents the first reported evidence of Predator spyware being used in Pakistan.

The targeting comes amid severe restrictions on rights of human rights activists in Balochistan province, including increasingly common province-wide internet shutdowns.

Advertising-Based Zero-Click Infections

The leaked materials provide fresh insights into Predator infection vectors, including a new strategic vector called "Aladdin" that exploits the commercial mobile advertising ecosystem to enable silent zero-click infection of target devices anywhere in the world.

The Aladdin system infects target phones by forcing malicious advertisements created by attackers to be shown on target devices. Internal company materials explain that simply viewing the advertisement triggers infection without any need to click, using the target's public IP address as the unique target identifier.

Based on analysis of Predator network infrastructure, Amnesty International believes the Aladdin vector was supported in active Predator deployments in 2024.

Google delivered government-backed attack warnings to several hundred accounts across Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Angola, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Saudi Arabia, and Tajikistan associated with Intellexa customers since 2023.

A threat group dubbed ShadyPanda exploited traditional extension processes in browser marketplaces by uploading legitimate extensions and then quietly weaponization them with malicious updates, infecting 4.3 million Chrome and Edge users with RCE malware and spyware.

The post ShadyPanda’s Years-Long Browser Hack Infected 4.3 Million Users appeared first on Security Boulevard.

Apple is now offering a $2M bounty for a zero-click exploit. According to the Apple website:

Today we’re announcing the next major chapter for Apple Security Bounty, featuring the industry’s highest rewards, expanded research categories, and a flag system for researchers to objectively demonstrate vulnerabilities and obtain accelerated awards.

1. We’re doubling our top award to $2 million for exploit chains that can achieve similar goals as sophisticated mercenary spyware attacks. This is an unprecedented amount in the industry and the largest payout offered by any bounty program we’re aware of ­ and our bonus system, providing additional rewards for Lockdown Mode bypasses and vulnerabilities discovered in beta software, can more than double this reward, with a maximum payout in excess of $5 million. We’re also doubling or significantly increasing rewards in many other categories to encourage more intensive research. This includes $100,000 for a complete Gatekeeper bypass, and $1 million for broad unauthorized iCloud access, as no successful exploit has been demonstrated to date in either category.
2. Our bounty categories are expanding to cover even more attack surfaces. Notably, we’re rewarding one-click WebKit sandbox escapes with up to $300,000, and wireless proximity exploits over any radio with up to $1 million.
3. We’re introducing Target Flags, a new way for researchers to objectively demonstrate exploitability for some of our top bounty categories, including remote code execution and Transparency, Consent, and Control (TCC) bypasses ­ and to help determine eligibility for a specific award. Researchers who submit reports with Target Flags will qualify for accelerated awards, which are processed immediately after the research is received and verified, even before a fix becomes available.

The Atlantic Council has published its second annual report: “Mythical Beasts: Diving into the depths of the global spyware market.”

Too much good detail to summarize, but here are two items:

First, the authors found that the number of US-based investors in spyware has notably increased in the past year, when compared with the sample size of the spyware market captured in the first Mythical Beasts project. In the first edition, the United States was the second-largest investor in the spyware market, following Israel. In that edition, twelve investors were observed to be domiciled within the United States—­whereas in this second edition, twenty new US-based investors were observed investing in the spyware industry in 2024. This indicates a significant increase of US-based investments in spyware in 2024, catapulting the United States to being the largest investor in this sample of the spyware market. This is significant in scale, as US-based investment from 2023 to 2024 largely outpaced that of other major investing countries observed in the first dataset, including Italy, Israel, and the United Kingdom. It is also significant in the disparity it points to ­the visible enforcement gap between the flow of US dollars and US policy initiatives. Despite numerous US policy actions, such as the addition of spyware vendors on the Entity List, and the broader global leadership role that the United States has played through imposing sanctions and diplomatic engagement, US investments continue to fund the very entities that US policymakers are making an effort to combat.

Second, the authors elaborated on the central role that resellers and brokers play in the spyware market, while being a notably under-researched set of actors. These entities act as intermediaries, obscuring the connections between vendors, suppliers, and buyers. Oftentimes, intermediaries connect vendors to new regional markets. Their presence in the dataset is almost assuredly underrepresented given the opaque nature of brokers and resellers, making corporate structures and jurisdictional arbitrage more complex and challenging to disentangle. While their uptick in the second edition of the Mythical Beasts project may be the result of a wider, more extensive data-collection effort, there is less reporting on resellers and brokers, and these entities are not systematically understood. As observed in the first report, the activities of these suppliers and brokers represent a critical information gap for advocates of a more effective policy rooted in national security and human rights. These discoveries help bring into sharper focus the state of the spyware market and the wider cyber-proliferation space, and reaffirm the need to research and surface these actors that otherwise undermine the transparency and accountability efforts by state and non-state actors as they relate to the spyware market.

Really good work. Read the whole thing.