He himself served as an emissary in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, when it was already clear what use the authorities there were making of the systems.
OpsBedil operation, first seen in 2021, has resurged amid the escalating tensions among Palestinians and Israelis.
As early as 2016 the United Nations stated that Israeli companies were selling equipment to South Sudan that was used for eavesdropping on opponents of the regime.
Ben-Israel now heads the Interdisciplinary Cyber Studies Center at Tel Aviv University.
Its exposure generated worldwide panic.
In 2020, researcher Facundo MuƱoz found evidence suggesting that Equation Group collaborated with Stuxnet developers in 2009 by lending them at least one zero-day exploit, and one exploit from 2008 that was being actively used in-the-wild by the computer worm and Chinese hackers.