new delhi meta formerly facebook on friday said it has disabled seven surveillanceforhire entities including one from india that targeted individuals including politicians election officials human rights activists and celebrities in over 100 countries on behalf of their clients surveillanceforhire companies target people to collect intelligence manipulate and compromise their devices and accounts across the internet these surveillance providers are based in china israel india and north macedonia the social media giant is sending alerts to almost 50000 people across more than 100 countries who it believes were targeted by one or more of these entities the seven entities include belltrox india cytrox north macedonia cobwebs technologies cognyte black cube and bluehawk ci israel and an unknown entity in china releasing its threat report on the surveillanceforhire industry meta head of security policy nathaniel gleicher said the report is a result of a monthslong investigation and the company took action against seven different surveillanceforhire entities to disrupt their ability to use their digital infrastructure to abuse social media platforms and enable surveillance of people across the internet were seeing journalists who are targeted were seeing political figures politicians election officials were seeing human rights defenders and activists celebrities and then were seeing ordinary everyday people anyone who might be party to a lawsuit for example so were seeing this very wide targeting across society he added in 2019 whatsapp part of meta had sued israeli technology firm nso group which had developed a software called pegasus that was allegedly used to conduct cyberespionage on journalists human rights activists and others on friday meta said these seven organisations provided services across all three phases of the surveillance chain reconnaissance engagement and exploitation that were used to indiscriminately target people to help disrupt these activities we blocked related infrastructure banned these entities from our platform and issued cease and desist warnings putting each of them on notice that their targeting of people has no place on our platform and is against our community standards he said these findings have also been shared with security researchers other platforms and policymakers so they too can take appropriate action we also notified people who we believe were targeted to help them take steps to strengthen the security of their accounts the entities behind these surveillance operations are persistent and we expect them to evolve their tactics however our detection systems and threat investigators as well as other teams in the broader security community keep improving to make it harder for them to remain undetected gleicher noted the report said meta had removed about 400 facebook accounts the vast majority of which were inactive for years linked to belltrox and used for reconnaissance social engineering and to send malicious links belltrox is based in india and sells whats known as hacking for hire services which were reported previously as well its activity on metas platform was limited and sporadic between 2013 to 2019 after which it paused belltrox operated fake accounts to