Spain based cyber intelligence firm “Variston” extended their empire to the UAE
Spanish cyber intelligence firm Variston Information Technology founded by Ralf Wegener and Ramanan Jayaraman has successfully expanded its cyber empire in UAE.
Recently, Variston has successfully established its cyber-implants in the United Arab Emirates, by getting gradually closer to Beacon Red, the cyber subsidiary of the part state-owned defence company Edge Group, and the country’s cyber-offensive firm, CPX. Both the companies are under the thumb of the powerful national security adviser of UAE, Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan.
Its co-founder also owns Cyprus-based startup Prixie which offers incident detection and response solutions as well as forensics tools for data acquisition and analysis as its services — and the Singapore-based data and imagery analysis company Nanostrea.
Recently, In March 2023 Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) discovered that heliconia framework developed by commercial spyware vendor Variston used by hackers for targeting people in the UAE for those who used Samsung’s Android browser is based on the Chromium open-source project. The hackers used exploit chains to target UAE users via one-time web links sent to the targets by text message.
At the end of 2018 after Varistan was founded, it took over Italian zero-day vulnerabilities research company Truel IT, led by Italian researcher Filippo Roncari, who is now Variston’s head of research. It also took top researchers of many cyber offensive firms across the globe like Umang Raghuvanshi from Indian based Secfence Technologies and Israeli Haim Tzuk.
Secfence Technologies were headed by Atul Agarwal was a big suppliers of vulnerabilities and developed advance cyber-offensive operations for their clients that are harder to detect. The firm’s main vision was to detect unknown vulnerabilities and the development of new malware. Its main focus is on concealing attacks and hiding tracks to counter cyber attacks.
Secfence also participated in the ISS World Surveillance fair Dubai on March 2021 to explain its potential and capability to use malware sort applications that exploits communication channels used by legitimate applications for putting a check on hostile elements.
This indicates that cyber offensive companies are recruiting talented people all across the world to make their company unique in offensive services.
