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Joogle Ads – Israeli ad agency conducted vast global espionage campaign using zero-click online ads hack

October 16, 2026

Reported by: The Cradle

An Israeli digital advertising agency helped run an espionage campaign using a vast network of online ads to track targets and hack their devices, Reuters reported on 15 October, citing two research groups.

Reports from Canadian cyber watchdog group Citizen Lab and New York advertising security firm Confiant document how the Israeli advertising agency Discover-Tech placed millions of ads online each day for ordinary products such as phones or earpods.

Discover-Tech placed the ads using the advertising services of Google, Comcast, Yandex, and other search engines.

The Israeli ad agency could identify and track internet users who visited websites or used apps with the malicious ads, and at times obtained phone numbers from smartphone users.

Clicking on the ads was not required to allow users to be tracked.

Some ads were used to plant spyware from another Israeli firm, Candiru, on users’ devices.

Jerome Dangu of Confiant said Discover-Tech placed at least 10 million online ads per day, affecting more than 120,000 websites and 75,000 apps.

“Very likely hundreds of millions of people would have been touched by Discover-Tech,” Dangu said.

Citizen Lab said Candiru spyware delivered through Discover-Tech’s ads had been used to compromise devices of journalists and executives at the Qatari news outlet Al Jazeera.

Unidentified media organizations in Mexico, Israel, and Europe were also targeted.

Dangu of Confiant said that the malicious Israeli ads targeted officials at the Pentagon, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and the International Criminal Court (ICC).

🇮🇱 Israeli ad CAUGHT RUNNING SPYWARE on Al Jazeera journalists devices

Citizen Lab caught Israeli company Discover Tech weaponizing regular web ads to deploy Candiru spyware onto Al Jazeera devices.

The scary thing about this was that reporters didn’t even need to click a… pic.twitter.com/51L491tyu9

— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) October 15, 2026

NEW @citizenlab report We uncovered an Israeli firm using online ads to run vast spy operation

This is the first-ever public confirmation of zero-click mercenary spyware delivered via targeted ads.

45 devices at @AJEnglish confirmed infectedhttps://t.co/iish9n1bpk

— profdeibert (@RonDeibert) October 15, 2026

Discover-Tech ads also helped to surveil the populations of entire regions, most notably the Israeli-occupied Palestinian West Bank and Gaza.

“You go to almost any site in Palestine – any site – you find a Discover-Tech ad. It gives them a very complete visibility on the digital activities of an entire country,” Dangu said.

Citizen Lab also said the malicious ads were directed at officials in the UN, NATO, the European ⁠Commission, as well as more than a dozen governments.

The ads also helped to track employees and executives of chip-related firms such as Nvidia, SanDisk, Broadcom, and Micron.

As a result of the Confiant and Citizen Lab investigations, Google said it has removed Discover-Tech from its ad platforms “for systematically violating our policies.”

IAB Europe, an association for digital marketing and advertising on the continent, has now suspended Discover-Tech from its list of globally approved vendors.

Comcast ad tech subsidiary Beeswax also removed Discover-Tech from its platform.

Yandex did not respond to Reuters’‘ requests for comment.

Israel has a well-documented history of using private technology companies for surveillance, intelligence gathering, and cyberespionage.

Some of these companies have close connections to Israel’s military and intelligence services, particularly Unit 8200, the Israeli military’s signals intelligence unit.