Israeli ad tech firm tied to suspected Starlink tracking effort, report claims

Discover-Tech, an Israeli advertising technology company, has reportedly been linked to a suspected surveillance effort aimed at Starlink users, according to Reuters. The report, which cites six people familiar with the matter, claims the firm was the top bidder for ad space tied to Starlink traffic in more than 100 countries. Researchers suspect the aggressive bidding was meant to reveal where users are located or to enable further monitoring — though the findings do not show that anyone was actually tracked.

The data comes from TrendAI, the research arm of Trend Micro. Its October 15 report referred to the activity as ‘Shadow-Earth-79’ without naming a company, but the report claims the codename belongs to Discover-Tech. TrendAI says its attribution process is designed to avoid ‘hype-driven labels’ that could mislead security teams. “Our approach reduces the risk of misattribution, hype-driven labels, and unstable actor names that can mislead defenders, distort risk prioritization, and trigger inappropriate response actions.” The report says.

The …