The Committee to Protect Journalists calls on Israeli and other relevant authorities to investigate and hold to account those responsible for reportedly infecting Al Jazeera news network devices with spyware delivered via online ads, and on governments and corporations to act urgently to ensure advertising no longer enables targeted surveillance.
“The mass surveillance architecture supporting online advertising is being harnessed for other purposes and puts journalists at risk,” said Jonathan Rozen, CPJ’s deputy director of research and analysis, who
reported
on such threats in August. “Citizen Lab’s findings that Al Jazeera devices were infected with spyware delivered via targeted ads make these surveillance dangers even clearer.”
Details of how an Israeli company called Discover-Tech facilitated the targeting in 2024 and 2025 of at least 45 Al Jazeera devices with spyware from a firm known as Candiru/
Integrity Labs
were released October 15 in an
investigation
by the University of Toronto-based Citizen Lab research group on advertising spyware, entitled “Exposing AdFection.”
The report did not name a government or specific client of the companies involved as responsible for ordering the attacks on Al Jazeera.
In an October 15
news article
, Al Jazeera said it condemned the targeting of its employees’ devices, calling it an “assault on press freedom and the public’s right to knowledge,” and urging that those responsible be held accountable.
The network reported that its technology team discovered unusual patterns on journalists’ devices in 2024, and contacted Citizen Lab to investigate further. Al Jazeera said that its information “contributed to verifying these attacks and publicly documenting them.”
Presenting as a legitimate advertising company, and with connections to the Israeli cyber-espionage sector, Discover-Tech operates a platform called Controlium that “allows malicious actors to precisely profile and de-anonymize millions of individual
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