The Israeli government has limited the number of nations to which local security businesses can sell surveillance and offensive hacking equipment by nearly two-thirds, reducing the official cyber export list from 102 to 37.
Only nations with established democracies are included in the new list, which was obtained by Israeli business publication Calcalist earlier today, such as those from Europe and the Five Eyes coalition:
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US.
Autocratic regimes, to which Israeli corporations have frequently sold surveillance tools, are strikingly absent from the list.
Spyware produced by Israeli businesses such as Candiru and the NSO Group has been attributed to human rights violations in tens of nations in recent years, with local governments using the tools to spy on journalists, activists, dissidents, and political opponents.
The government has not issued a comment on the list's update, according to Calcalist journalists, and it is unclear why it was cut down earlier this month.
The timing, on the other hand, shows that the Israeli government might have been driven it to make this choice.
The list was updated a week after a covert meeting between Israeli and French officials to address suspicions that NSO Group malware was deployed against French President Emmanuel Macron.
The announcement coincided with the US sanctioning of four monitoring firms, including Israel's Candiru and NSO Group.
The penalties are reported to have sent NSO into a death spiral, with the business sliding from a prospective sale to French investors to losing its newly-appointed CEO and perhaps filing for bankruptcy as it has become company-non-grata in the realm of cyberweapons.
Azimuth Security co-founder Mark Dowd discussed Israeli-based surveillance distributors and their knack for selling to offensive regimes in an episode of the Risky Business podcast last month, blaming it on the fact that these companies don't usually have connections in western governments to compete with western competitors.
With the Israeli Defense Ministry tightening restrictions on cyber exports to autocratic regimes, the restricted cyber export list is likely to make a significant hole in Israel's estimated $10 billion surveillance sector.
As per a study released earlier this month by the Atlantic Council, there are roughly 224 firms providing surveillance and hacking tools, with 27 of them located in Israel.
