3 Section 5 provides further documentation of Candiru’s corporate structure and ownership. Table 1 : Candiru’s corporate registrations over timeĬandiru has at least one subsidiary: Sokoto Ltd. The firm’s corporate logo appears to be a silhouette of the reputedly-gruesome Candiru fish in the shape of the letter “C.” Company name While the company’s current name is Saito Tech Ltd, we will refer to them as “Candiru” as they are most well known by that name. Like many mercenary spyware corporations, the company reportedly recruits from the ranks of Unit 8200, the signals intelligence unit of the Israeli Defence Forces. was founded in 2014 and has undergone several name changes 2 ( see: Table 1 ). 1 A Deliberately Opaque Corporate structureĬandiru makes efforts to keep its operations, infrastructure, and staff identities opaque to public scrutiny. Their product offering includes solutions for spying on computers, mobile devices, and cloud accounts.įigure 1: A distinctive mural of five men with empty heads wearing suits and bowler hats is displayed in this “Happy Hour” photo a previous Candiru office posted on Facebook by a catering company. The company known as “Candiru,” based in Tel Aviv, Israel, is a mercenary spyware firm that markets “untraceable” spyware to government customers. Nevertheless, we have been able to shed some light on those areas in this report.

Candiru has made efforts to obscure its ownership structure, staffing, and investment partners.

We provide a brief technical overview of the Candiru spyware’s persistence mechanism and some details about the spyware’s functionality.

Victims include human rights defenders, dissidents, journalists, activists, and politicians.

As part of their investigation, Microsoft observed at least 100 victims in Palestine, Israel, Iran, Lebanon, Yemen, Spain, United Kingdom, Turkey, Armenia, and Singapore.

Microsoft patched both vulnerabilities on July 13th, 2021.

Working with Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) we analyzed the spyware, resulting in the discovery of CVE-2021-31979 and CVE-2021-33771 by Microsoft, two privilege escalation vulnerabilities exploited by Candiru.

We identified a politically active victim in Western Europe and recovered a copy of Candiru’s Windows spyware.

We found many domains masquerading as advocacy organizations such as Amnesty International, the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as media companies, and other civil-society themed entities.

Using Internet scanning we identified more than 750 websites linked to Candiru’s spyware infrastructure.

Reportedly, their spyware can infect and monitor iPhones, Androids, Macs, PCs, and cloud accounts.

Candiru is a secretive Israel-based company that sells spyware exclusively to governments.

Bill Marczak, John Scott-Railton, Kristin Berdan, Bahr Abdul Razzak, and Ron Deibert JSummary

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