Spanish spy -booting Mollitiam Industries excludes

Mollitiam Industries, a small and little -known Spanish spyware manufacturer, is switched off.

The conviction of the startup has been reported for the first time Intelligence and surveillance are trading a new Intelligence Online website, which has accused the company’s decline in financial affairs. Public business records Confirm that the company has applied for bankruptcy on January 23.

Unlike Hacker., NSO Groupand now Paragon SolutionsMollitiam Industries, which is based in Toledo, a city outside Madrid, Spain, has acted in public view. In part, secrecy is just a consequence of the nature of the spy industry: there are many suppliers around the world and a significant amount of them do not want any publicity.

Another reason why the Mollitiam Industries avoids publicity may have less in common with the spy industry itself and more with the fact that the launch of spyware is based in Spain, which does not receive much attention from international English-speaking media, and also because Mollitiam Industries was only known to participate in a scandal in Colombia, another place that could be undervalued in the English -language world.

During writing, Mollitiam Industries’ official website It’s still online. The company did not answer a request for a comment sent to the email address listed on the site. When TechCrunch called the phone number listed on the company’s Google Maps list, the line was busy. According to His official LinkedIn accountMollitiam Industries had between 11 and 50 employees.

In 2021, the Mollitiam Industries first caught the attention of the English -language media. Wired reports at that time The fact that the brochure is inadvertently left online from a third party showed that start -ups developed spy products called invisible person and night creeper, which are designed to secretly retrieve target devices, including from messaging applications such as Telegram and WhatsApp, activate cameras activate cameras On the device and the microphone, steal passwords and register keys.

Last year, in 2020, The Colombian magazine Semana reported that his journalists and his offices were under physical and digital monitoring by the country’s military intelligence, whose agents were reported to have removed journalists with threats that include their sending to tombstones. The monitoring and intimidation campaign came after the magazine publishes investigations on suspected misconduct by officers from the military in 2019.

“Cyber ​​intelligence colonel offered me 50 million pesos (about $ 15,000 at the time) to introduce malware (virus) on Semana journalists’ computers and thus have access to information,” a source told the magazine S

This malware is obviously developed by Mollitiam Industries, According to a photograph of a contract Mollitiam Industrines.

The document showed that the military agency made an offer of nearly $ 3 billion (about $ 900,000 at the time) to acquire a system called “Hombre invisible” (or an invisible person). The software is said to be able to infect MacOS and Windows devices as remotely, to hide internal documents and via USB device. Malware can also circumvent antivirus software and allow military officers to infect an “unlimited” number of active goals.

“This tool allows us to do everything: log in to any computer, access to WhatsApp and Telegram web calls and conversations, download archived or deleted chat calls, photos and generally everything stored in the memory of the infected machine,” An anonymous source told a source to an anonymous source of the seman.

The same year as a scandal with Colombia, Mollitiam Industries exported an online talk Through the ISS World series of conferences for companies that want to sell products to law enforcement and intelligence.

The company wrote in the description of the conversation that end -to -end encryption impedes the eavesdropping of the intended persons and refers to the need to use malware to compromise the device of the target to access their communications. According to the description“Mollitiam will explain the roots of this approach through software demonstrations and share innovative features such as WhatsApp VoIP calls.”

Mollitiam Industries has been active at least until the end of 2023, according to Meta. In early 2024, Meta said in a report that it has removed a network of fake accounts on Facebook and Instagram, which is linked to Mollitiam Industries.

“Mollitiam Industries and its customers have launched counterfeit accounts that they used to test malicious capabilities among their own accounts and spell out public information. Like other hiring companies, they used IP-body links aimed at tracking the IP addresses of their goals, “the report read. “They are also engaged in phishing and social engineering, aimed mainly at people in Spain, Colombia and Peru, including political opposition, journalists, anti -corruption activists and police abuse activists.”

Spain and more special Barcelona, Has recently become hot beds for startups of spy softwareSome of whom are founded by foreigners who are recruiting security researchers from other countries, including Italy and Israel.

While the company has received relatively little attention, its activities are tracked by Amnesty International. Jurre Van Bergen, a technologist at the Amnesty International Security Laboratory, told TechCrunch that he and his colleagues have discovered Mollitiam Industries’ Windows samples and identify a command and control server that is censys, online with the Internet, as an “invisible person input”, clear Reference to one of the company’s products.

“Extremely clearing the work of a spyware manufacturer to prevent it from putting it behind a firewall,” Van Bergen told TechCrunch. “I guess I’m not surprised given their slop, they go bankrupt.”