Israeli spyware vendor QuaDream is reportedly shutting down its operations following the recent exposure of its hacking toolset by Citizen Lab and Microsoft.
According to Israeli business newspaper Calcalist, the company “hasn’t been fully active for a while” and has been in a difficult situation for several months. The company’s board of directors is reportedly looking to sell off its intellectual property.
Furthermore, QuaDream’s spyware framework, dubbed REIGN, was used against journalists, political opposition figures, and NGO workers across several countries.
REIGN is a suite of exploits, malware, and infrastructure designed to exfiltrate data from mobile devices. The attacks involved the exploitation of a now-patched flaw in iOS to deploy sophisticated surveillanceware that could surreptitiously gather sensitive information.
QuaDream, along with other Israeli spyware vendors NSO Group and Candiru, is a private-sector offensive actor that markets end-to-end hacking tools to its customers.
At the same time, while QuaDream has largely stayed out of the public eye, reports suggest that its spyware technology was sold to Saudi Arabia to carry out zero-click attacks against targets of interest.
Additionally, in 2021, Reuters revealed that QuaDream had independently developed an exploit to break into iPhones, which was comparable to the one provided by NSO Group by leveraging a flaw in iMessage. Apple addressed the vulnerability in September 2021.
