>>14678241 TYB
From 2017
Marczak had indeed found “something huge.” An activist friend in the United Arab Emirates had sent him an e-mail containing a single Internet link, which Marczak was almost certain would, if clicked, release malignant spyware into his mobile phone. He managed to isolate a portion of its code, but it was so complex he decided to forward a copy across San Francisco Bay to engineers at a computer-security outfit called Lookout, whose offices high in a downtown skyscraper afforded panoramic views from the Golden Gate Bridge to Oakland.
A pair of Lookout engineers, Andrew Blaich, a sandy-haired mobile-security specialist, and Max Bazaliy, an intense grad student from the Ukraine, were the first at the company to study the heavily obfuscated code.
“What do you think it is?” Blaich asked.
“I don’t know. Something really, really bad,” Bazaliy answered in his thick Ukrainian accent.
It took all day for the two to realize just how bad.
AND
One had. It had created three domain names, all impersonating a popular Web site for Arab news and gossip. Digging deeper, he found each was associated with something called “SMSer.net.” When he searched the Internet for servers with “SMS” in their domain names, he found about 120, almost all associated with mobile-phone companies in developing countries such as Mexico and Mozambique. Next Marczak checked who had registered these domain names. Most of the street addresses associated with the domain names were seemingly located in Israel.
“That’s when I thought, Hmm, I wonder if this is NSO,” he remembers.
NSO Group was a six-year-old Israeli spyware company so secretive it didn’t even have a corporate Web site. Marczak knew of it from a single entry on an Israeli Ministry of Defense Web site, in which the company claimed to have developed cutting-edge spyware. Checking further, he was surprised to find that two years earlier it had sold a controlling stake in its business to Francisco Partners, a San Francisco hedge fund, for $120 million.
Though he strongly suspected NSO software was being used in the Stealth Falcon attacks, Marczak couldn’t prove it.
Moar at link:
https://archive.ph/zk7pV
>Checking further, he was surprised to find that two years earlier it had sold a controlling stake in its business to Francisco Partners, a San Francisco hedge fund, for $120 million.
Francisco Partners in the USAspending.gov database is known by 12 other names (cap related) and has rec'd $321.9 million from the USG for all fiscal years.
https://www.usaspending.gov/keyword_search/%22Francisco%20Partners%22
>>14678384 (me) fuggg