Mollitiam Industries, a small Spanish manufacturer of little known Spanish software, stops.
The disappearance of the startup was reported for the first time Through the New website Intelligence Online Intelligence and Trade Surveillance, which blamed the falling company with financial issues. Public commercial files Confirm that the company has filed a bankruptcy on January 23.
Contrary to Hacking team,, NSO groupand now Parangon solutionsMollitiam Industries, based in Toledo, a city outside Madrid, Spain, mainly operated by the public. Partly, the secret is only a consequence of the nature of the spy software industry: there are many suppliers from around the world, and a significant amount of them want no advertising.
Another reason why Mollitiam Industries avoids advertising can have less to do with the spy software industry itself, and more to do with the fact that the spy startup was based in Spain, which does not get A lot of attention from international media in English, and also because Mollitiam Industries has only been known to be involved in a scandal in Colombia, another place that can be under-declared in the world Anglophone.
When writing the editorial’s time, Mollitiam Industries’ official website is still online. The company did not respond to a comment request sent to an e-mail address indicated on the site. When Techcrunch called a telephone number listed on the company’s Google Maps list, the line was occupied. According to His official LinkedIn accountMollitiam Industries was between 11 and 50 employees.
In 2021, Mollitiam Industries drew the attention of English -speaking media. Wired reported at the time That a brochure is involuntarily left online by a third party showed that the startup has developed Spyware products called invisible Crawler Man and Night, which have been designed to surreptitiously extract target data, including messaging applications like Telegram and WhatsApp , activate the camera cameras and microphone, steal the passwords and the keys of Journalization.
The previous year, in 2020, Colombian News Magazine Semana reported That his journalists and offices were under physical and digital surveillance by the country’s military intelligence agency, whose agents would have intimidated journalists with threats that included their sending of tombstones. The surveillance and intimidation campaign intervened after the magazine published investigations on the alleged reprehensible acts of army officers in 2019.
“A cyber-intelligence colonel offered me 50 million pesos [around $15,000 at the time] To introduce a malware (virus) into the computers of Semana journalists and therefore be able to access information, “a source told the magazine.
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That malware has been apparently developed by Mollitiam Industries, According to a photo of a contract Between the National Army of Colombia (Ejército Nacional de Colombia) and Mollitiam Industries.
The document has shown that the military agency was making an offer of nearly 3 billion pesos (around $ 900,000 at the time) to acquire a system called “invisible hombre” (or invisible man). The software would have been able to infect macOS and Windows devices remotely, hiding inside desktop documents and via USB Drive. Malventy software could also bypass antivirus software and allow military officers to infect an “unlimited” number of active targets.
“This tool allows us to do everything: enter any computer, access whatsapp and telegram web calls and conversations, download archived or deleted chat conversations, photos and generally everything that is stored in memory of the infected machine, “said an anonymous Sémana source.
The same year as the Colombia scandal, Mollitiam Industries gave an online speech Through ISS World, a series of conferences for companies wishing to sell products to law and intelligence agencies.
The company wrote in the description of the conference that end -to -end encryption made it more difficult to listen to the planned people, and refer to the need to use malware to compromise the target device in order to ‘Access their communications. According to the description“Mollitiam will explain the roots of this approach through software demonstrations, and will share innovative features such as VoIP Whatsapp calls.”
Mollitiam Industries was active at least until the end of 2023, according to Meta. Early 2024, meta said in a report that he had deleted a network of false accounts on Facebook and Instagram linked to Mollitiam Industries.
“Mollitiam Industries and its customers organized false accounts which they have used to test the malicious capacities among their own accounts and scratch public information. Similar to other surveillance companies for hiring, they used IP loging links to trace the IP addresses of their targets, ”says the report. “They also engaged in phishing and social engineering targeting mainly the inhabitants of Spain, Colombia and Peru, in particular political opposition, journalists, anti-corruption activists and activists against the abuses of the police.”
Spain, and in particular Barcelona, recently became a home for Spyware startupsSome of which were founded by foreigners recruiting security researchers from other countries, including Italy and Israel.
While the company received relatively little attention, its activities were followed by Amnesty International. Jurre Van Bergen, technologist at the Amnesty International security laboratory, told Techcrunch that he and his colleagues had found Windows samples from Mollitiam Industries and identified a command and control server that was indexed to censys, an engine of Online research for devices connected to the Internet, such as “Invisible Man Login”, a clear reference to one of the companies in companies.
“An extremely sloppy work of an spy software manufacturer so as not to put this behind a firewall,” Van Bergen told Techcrunch. “I guess I am not surprised given their sloppy work, they went bankrupt.”
