Citizen Lab

Citizen Lab traced an Israeli ad platform, Discover-Tech, that won 442 million of 3.77 billion impressions it bid on in four months while spending only about $109,000. Advertiser conversions were essentially zero: the ads carried script tags that can hand code to a phone.

An adtech engineer with 13 years in the industry told the thread that vetting that traffic is "virtually impossible". A commenter who once sat in telco-versus-police meetings had heard that line before, and asked why billing is not impossible too.

Citizen Lab reports that Kouloglou — Greek journalist, former MEP, substitute member of the Parliament's PEGA spyware inquiry — had his iPhone infected with NSO Group's Pegasus around October 2022 and again March 2023, timed to hearings and the final report. No specific government is named, but the operator overlaps with one that targeted exiled Russian and Belarusian journalists.

The thread reframes it: this may be an EU member state spying on the EU's own investigators — the calls coming from inside the house.