by ¡Do Not Panic! at The Grayzone
The Pentagon, Treasury Department, DHS, and a variety of other US government agencies have begun relying on a firm launched by former Israeli military intelligence operatives to consolidate and protect their data.
This article was originally published by ¡Do Not Panic!
A company with deep ties to Israeli intelligence oversees cyber security across more than seventy US government agencies, including the Department of Defense and Homeland Security.
Axonius was founded by former spies in Israel’s Unit 8200 and its software, which allows an operator ‘visibility and control over all types and number of devices,’ collects and analyses the digital data of millions of US federal employees.
The stated aim of the Axonius platform is to centralize IT tools to identity and fix security breaches. As a product of Israeli intelligence, however, the scale of Axonius’s use across the US government raises serious questions.
Axonius was founded and is currently run by Israelis Dean Sysman, Ofri Shur and Avidor Bartov, who met in the 2010s while working on the same team within Israel’s Unit 8200 spy service. On his LinkedIn profile, Sysman offers few details of their work for the IDF, describing it simply as having ‘far-reaching implications.’
Sysman left the IDF in 2014 after five years and set up a cyber hacking outfit, while Shur and Bartov stayed on until 2017, a period which encompassed Israel’s 2014 war of aggression against Gaza, during which the IDF murdered more than two thousand Palestinian civilians.
Axonius was established with curious speed. After leaving the IDF in 2017,…
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