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Investors’ pledge to fight spyware undercut by past investments in US malware maker
Paladin Capital Group says it doesn’t want to invest in spyware companies, but it invested in a U.S. based exploit maker in the past.
On Monday, the Biden administration announced that six new countries had joined an international coalition to fight the proliferation of commercial spyware, sold by companies such as NSO Group or Intellexa. In a call with reporters on Monday that TechCrunch attended, a senior Biden administration official said that a representative from Paladin participated in meetings at the White House on March 7, as well as this week in Seoul, where governments gathered for the Summit for Democracy to discuss spyware. Boldend states in the slides that it hoped to develop software for “full turn-key cyber operations” like offensive cyber capabilities, electronic warfare, and signals intelligence; hack-back services sanctioned by the U.S. government; and an AI platform “to dynamically identify, exploit, build infrastructure, as well as create online personas to perform a variety of intelligence tasks while maintaining forensic integrity,” including creating and diffusing “fake news story with social media.”
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