All the spy synergies between Israel and Dubai
The point of Giuseppe Gagliano
Dubai Emir Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum lost his appeal to the London High Court over the custody battle against his wife, Princess Haya bint Al Hussein of Jordan, despite the efforts of Israel's top cyber experts . The emir had turned to the Israeli company Sygnia to challenge the accusations of Bill Marczak, of the Canadian NGO Citizen Lab .
In the analysis of a compromised device belonging to an anonymous victim of the Pegasus spyware of the Israeli cyber company led by Shalev Hulio, NSO Group, conducted around mid-2020, Marczak detected the presence of a command and control server for the cyber tool . The server also communicated with IP addresses belonging to the law firm representing Haya bint Al Hussein in her legal dispute with Maktoum. The matter of espionage quickly became even more central to the lawsuit when the NSO warned directly, via Cherie Blair (wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair) that its equipment could be used on Al Hussein and his lawyer Fiona Shackleton.
In an effort to salvage the company's reputation after the damaging publicity surrounding the much-publicized “Projet Pegasus,” NSO announced on 6 October that it had terminated its contract with the United Arab Emirates over the affair.
In reality, Sygnia's influence on the case was negligible. The company, whose Europe Middle East and Africa (EMEA) subsidiary is led by Sharon Isaaci, former head of intelligence and information security at the Israeli Army's Home Front Command, did not have access to the data presented as evidence. by Marczak.
However, the company's involvement in the case reveals its connection to the Emir of Dubai.
Sygnia, which essentially employs former officers from Unit 8200 – the Israeli interception branch of Israel's military intelligence service, Aman – was in the portfolio of Team8, the venture capital firm founded by Aman's former boss Nadav Zafrir. In 2018 Sygnia was acquired by the Singapore sovereign fund Temasek and was subsequently integrated into its London subsidiary ISTARI Global.
Singapore, a major consumer of Israeli information technology has led a number of cybersecurity companies led by former Western intelligence chiefs under the auspices of ISTARI, including IronNet Cybersecurity, founded by former NSA chief Keith Alexander, which forms IT experts at the Prince Mohammed Bin Salman College of Cyber Security of Saudi Arabia.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/israele-dubai-nso-group-pegasus-sygnia/ on Fri, 15 Oct 2021 06:16:56 +0000.