IC Technology & Surveillance — 2026-04-27

Investigation Reveals Intellexa Had Secret US Partner That Fed Predator Spyware Android and iOS Exploits

A late-2020 civil suit filed at the Tel Aviv District Court by a former Intellexa associate alleges that Intellexa acquired Android and iOS zero-day exploit chains from a US company whose prior clientele was limited exclusively to the governments of the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. The parties finalized a revenue-sharing supply agreement at the Marriott Los Angeles from February 3 to 5, 2020, which the filing characterizes as the first sale by that company to a non-governmental buyer. The US firm, which maintained an office near GCHQ in the UK, was brokered into the deal through an intermediary with an Israeli intelligence background who later relocated to Japan. Antenna.gr reports it recovered the redacted company name from the court documents and notes that Predator subsequently deployed five previously unknown Android vulnerabilities within months during 2021.

Analysis
The February 2020 Los Angeles transaction predates Intellexa's 2023 Treasury designation by three years, meaning US-domiciled revenue flows from Predator deployments almost certainly accrued before any OFAC exposure attached. This timeline gap insulates the unnamed partner from retroactive sanctions liability while leaving potential EAR and ITAR exposure unresolved. The supplier's reported office adjacent to GCHQ headquarters indicates a dual-jurisdiction structure capable of straddling allied government vulnerability pipelines and commercial exploit brokering, a model observed in prior Five Eyes-adjacent surveillance vendor cases. Disclosure of the partner's identity is unlikely within the next six months. The Greek reporters' deliberate non-identification despite holding partial corporate records suggests durable legal or intelligence equities that outweigh identification vectors.

1 sources

How Predator acquired digital weapons intended for Western intelligence services - Antenna.gr