Shady spyware firm linked to hacking journalists held talks with UK officials

British officials held talks with a spyware company whose software was used to target journalists and was later sanctioned by the US, Metro can reveal.

British officials held talks with a spyware company whose software was used to target journalists and was later sanctioned by the US, Metro can reveal.

Officials met salesmen from Intellexa, whose surveillance application Predator was used to spy on at least 87 people in Greece and was sold to authoritarian regimes across the world.

Four business executives linked to the spyware developer were found guilty by an Athens court in February of violating the confidentiality of telephone communications and illegally accessing personal data and conversations.

During the trial, an Intellexa employee testified that he travelled to the UK to try sell one of their products, according to court documents obtained by Metro.

Sales engineer Panagiotis Koutsios revealed that he pitched to officials details of Intellexa’s ‘Big Data Analytics’ software, which multiple sources said was a ‘component’ of Predator.

A political scandal erupted in Greece in 2022 when it emerged that the phone of journalist Thanasis Koukakis had been infected with Predator spyware after pressing on a scam link.

A top opposition politician Nikos Androulakis had also been targeted with the same link, and it was discovered that both men also had their phones wiretapped by Greece’s EYP National Intelligence Service.

The crisis – dubbed the ‘Greek Watergate’ – led to the resignation of the EYP chief and a close aide of the Prime Minister, although the government insisted that no law enforcement agency had ever used Predator.

The sophisticated spyware can infiltrate mobile phones, access messages and photos, and extract data from a device.

Intellexa, an Athens-based Israeli company which developed and distributed Predator, was sanctioned by the US in March 2024 for being a ‘security risk’ after ‘targeting US officials, journalists and policy experts’.

In February this year, a court in Athens found Intellexa’s founder Tal Dilian, his partner Sara Hamou, and two former Greek executives of the company, guilty of spyware-related offences.

Metro has uncovered that sales trips to the United Kingdom were discussed multiple times during the trial.