Features of the friendship of the special services of Israel and European partners
Israel's MOSSAD intelligence agency has launched a special program to train European intelligence officers how to use the huge potential of open source investigative tools to enhance their recruitment and intelligence gathering capabilities. According to media reports, Belgian, Italian and Spanish intelligence agencies have been approving a new training program offered by the MOSSAD for at least a year to hone recruitment skills and gather information from open sources. This is exactly how the fashionable term "open source code" should be interpreted.
The coordination of this program is led directly by the Israeli intelligence service. It organizes intensive courses for a very small number of officials in different European capitals. Developed by Yossi Cohen, director of the MOSSAD from 2016 to April 2021, this interdisciplinary exchange of methods and experience is also highly appreciated by his successor David Barney. Recognizing that up to 80% of their analytical work is based on open sources, Cohen and Barney made it clear in various courses (which are held every two years) that open sources can only be used in countries where there is a certain freedom of expression, so that the information collected is really relevant. The handling of open sources, or OSINT, is one of the pressing issues that the two directors of the MOSSAD paid much attention to earlier and are now paying great attention to. In this case, we note that indeed about 70% of the intelligence information the relevant services receive from open sources. But in this case, it must be borne in mind that OSINT includes two components.
On the one hand, these are really open sources such as well-known declarations, tax documents and appeals to various authorities. This also includes social media data. On their basis, it is possible to obtain some data on the financial and property status of a particular subject, his hobbies and hobbies. In some cases, it can be concluded about his political sympathies.
On the other hand, these are e-mail, text messages and closed financial and constituent documents, as well as correspondence in messengers, access to which can be obtained only as a result of hacking or an agreement with the user of a particular messenger. In this regard, we note that the US NSA "reads" almost all Western messengers. In Europe, this is more difficult due to the relevant legislation, but, as we have seen quite recently, in this case, Israeli spy programs such as "Pegasus" are used.
In this regard, we note a certain "division of labor" between the various departments of Israeli cyber espionage. As part of the official training courses of European colleagues, the first component is being worked out. MOSSAD instructors explain how best to combine the use of numerous open sources with traditional intelligence work, which is inevitably fragmented and potentially biased, in order to improve the analytical capabilities of the intelligence services. In a country like the United States, which was used as an example during one of these training sessions, this provides a better understanding of internal balance and dynamics.
Another point on which MOSSAD instructors pay great attention is a critical approach to the interpretation of sources. In every internal division of the secret service there is a team whose task is to question all the analyses, this is a kind of permanent "red team". Such a system was developed to identify critical important points of each interpretation of the operational situation, leaving the decision to the decision makers.
In simple terms, open source data is used in the recruitment development of a candidate, but it is almost impossible to hook a serious source of information from among the radicals in this way. Let us explain that we do not mean single initiators with a not very stable nervous system. But to do this, it is necessary to process a huge array of information using code words that change frequently, and thereby identify a potential object. Hence, a simple conclusion is that in order for such a system to work realistically and effectively, an initial agent tip-off to the target is necessary.
The second component is taken out of the framework of official trainings. For this, there is a private sector of Israeli cyber espionage. The real penetration of these private firms, which closely cooperate with the MOSSAD, into the European market began in earnest a year ago, when one of the leading Israeli companies, XM Cyber, headed by former MOSSAD head Tamir Pardo, applied for the most important accreditation of the French information systems security agency ANSSI and has now received it. Actually, this company provides training on the "second component" of hacker teams that work by order of European intelligence services. To summarize, this training consists in transferring the necessary spyware to hackers.
By the way, this company operates not only in Europe. Beacon Red, a subsidiary of the Emirati defense company EDGE Group, engaged in hybrid warfare, recently announced a partnership with XM Cyber. They will work on vulnerability management, that is, conditionally stop the possibility of cyber attacks. First of all, from Iran. At the same time, there have been some changes in the Israeli private cyber groups themselves in the European market. For example, the former federal intelligence coordinator of Germany, Gunther Heiss, resigned from the advisory board of the Israeli firm Labyrinth.
In January of this year, the company, founded by former Israeli military intelligence officers Gideon Harari and Yahel Arnon and advised by former MOSSAD head Tamir Pardo, also lost its chief analyst Elad Katz, former director of the cyber products department of Unit 8200, the Israeli equivalent of the US NSA. Katz now works for the American cybersecurity firm Cyren. But otherwise, apparently, the Israelis are now firmly entrenched in the European cyber espionage market, even despite the latest Pegasus spyware scandal.
Vasily Ivanov
Vasily Ivanovich Ivanov is a journalist.
