The company Anomaly Six, or A6, could monitor the movement of billions of users of smartphones around the world, easily and with impunity.
This is revealed by two journalists from The Intercept and Tech Inquiry. While other companies are under fire from critics, such as NSO, publisher of the highly controversial Pegasus software, the A6 company operates in the shadows with complete impunity.
An illustration of the dangers of cyber espionage by private companies
Founded in 2018, A6 buys mobile apps their users’ location data. Objective: to identify them permanently and in real time. This is notably permitted by the consent granted by the users of the applications in the conditions of use, which are rarely read in practice.
But A6 does not stop there. The documents retrieved by The Intercept point to an alliance with Zignal Labs, which would link this location data to social media data, including Twitter. Indeed, Zignal Labs would have privileged access to data from the social network, although surveillance on this platform is prohibited in theory.
Be able to monitor global social media activity
What is A6’s real power? We learn more thanks to the recovered documents, which come from an internal presentation to the company. Note that its software offers a satellite view and allows you to track different devices entering and leaving a place or to know the history of the position points of a specific device by clicking on it.
A6 explains that 230 million devices are monitored worldwide. The company is said to be able to generate between 30 and 60 location pings per device per day. In addition to localization, A6 claims that it has notably procured 2 billion email addresses, obtained when users register for applications.
In a video, A6 notably showed how she had spied on… American agents from the headquarters of the NSA and the CIA. This is thanks to a geofencing technique, which triggers an action when a device enters a location. It has also managed to trace certain people’s homes, this time thanks to the “regularity” option of the software, which indirectly offers the possibility of attaching a device to the identity of an individual according to the places he frequents the most.
A work devilishly effective, inexpensive and terribly attractive for some actors. Motherboard reported that the United States Special Operations Command paid A6 $590,000 in September 2020 for one year of access to the company’s services…
Source : The Intercept
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