Calls for the U.S. government to prevent Mercenary Spyware Merchants

On Thursday, Cybersecurity professionals from Google’s threat hunting unit and the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab are increasing the pressure on mercenary hacking businesses, selling high-end surveillance spyware with fresh calls for the U.S. government to put a stop to these businesses as soon as possible.

Google’s Shane Huntley called on Congress for taking into consideration a “full ban” on the federal procurement of commercial spyware technologies and urged expanded U.S. government sanctions against the two notorious vendors — NSO Group and Candiru.

Huntley said that they welcome recent steps taken by the government in applying sanctions to the NSO Group and Candiru, and they believe other governments should consider expanding these restrictions.

He also tells the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence that The U.S. can also set an example to other governments by reviewing and disclosing its own historical use of these tools.

Huntley, who runs the Google Threat Analysis Group (TAG) and is also closely involved in documenting the use of zero-day exploits, believes that the rampant abuse of commercial spyware tools and ongoing use of zero-day exploits against widely deployed software have become too harmful to the society.

According to him, the U.S. Intelligence Community’s priority should be to identify and analyze threats from foreign commercial spyware providers as being on proportionate with the other major advanced hackers.