You go to a growing number of mercenary spyware companies and surveillance companies that

basically offer you NSA style capabilities in a box and say, look, you can pay a certain

amount of money and we're going to send you this stuff.

You're seeing basically the direct proliferation, not only have those capabilities, but

actually national security information about how to do this kind of hacking, moving its

way right into the

private sector. They fill a niche in the market. Nation states that lack surveillance capabilities

themselves, threat actors who want deniability in their surveillance activities, and clients, like

law firms or litigants who want an edge on their competition, in reality, the industry is

putting a thin veneer of professionalism over the same type of abusive activity that we would

see from other malicious hacking groups.

Welcome to patching the system, a special podcast for the Global Stage Series, a partnership between G0 Media and Microsoft.

I'm Ali Wine, a senior analyst at Eurasia Group.

Throughout this series, we're highlighting the work of the Cybersecurity Tech Accord, a public commitment from over 150 global technology companies dedicated to creating a safer cyber world for all of us.

Now today we're talking about mercenaries, and the concept is almost as old as warfare itself.

Hired guns, professional soldiers used in armed conflict, from Germans employed by the Romans in the 4th century,

to the routier of the Middle Ages, to modern-day security firms, whose fighters have been used

in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, as well as the current war in Ukraine.

But our conversation today is about cyber mercenaries, and these are financially motivated

private actors working in the online world to hack, to attack, and to spy on behalf of governments. And in today's world where warfare is increasingly

waged in the digital realm, nations use all the tools at their disposal to monitor

criminal and terrorist activity online. Now that includes spyware tools such as Pegasus,

...