Israeli company Discover-Tech, which has previously been linked to spying attacks through advertising, may have been particularly interested in Starlink users. Researchers noticed that it was extremely active in trying to show them ads in more than 100 countries. There is a suspicion that the company was actually interested in the location of satellite users.
Israeli company Discover-Tech, which has previously been linked to spying attacks through advertising, may have been particularly interested in Starlink users. Researchers noticed that it was extremely active in trying to show them ads in more than 100 countries. There is a suspicion that the company was actually interested in the location of satellite users.
Reuters reports this.
According to the researchers, Discover-Tech was the largest buyer of ads targeting Starlink users in 105 countries, accounting for about 13% of the ad auctions won in the Starlink traffic studied.
Moreover, the company actively purchased advertising even in countries where Starlink is banned or operates with restrictions, including Syria, Libya, and Myanmar. Therefore, researchers suggest that the real goal may have been to collect information about Starlink users and their whereabouts.
When a person opens a site or application, advertising systems conduct an auction in a split second between companies that want to show them ads.
During this process, advertisers can obtain data about the user’s device, their IP address, approximate location, and other technical details. In addition, some of the information is available even to those who did not win the auction. So if such data is collected over a long period of time and combined with other information, it is possible to try to identify the user, track their activity, or determine their whereabouts.
However, it is not known whether Discover-Tech attempted to track Ukrainian military personnel, nor is there any evidence that the company gained access to specific terminals or devices as part of this campaign.
Previously, dev.ua wrote that Citizen Lab researchers discovered a connection between the Discover-Tech advertising platform and the developers of spyware Candiru and Bindecy. Through advertisements, attackers could attack devices even if users did not click on the ads.
