Cytrox
spyware company
Cytrox is a company established in 2017 that makes malware used for cyberattacks and covert surveillance. Its Predator spyware was used to target Egyptian politician Ayman Nour in 2021 and to spy on 92 phones belonging to businessmen, journalists, politicians, government ministers and their associates in Greece. In 2023, the U.S. Department of Commerce added the Cytrox companies Cytrox AD in North Macedonia, and Cytrox Holdings Zrt in Hungary to its Entity List and on 5 March 2024, the U.S. Department of Treasury imposed sanctions upon Cytrox AD of North Macedonia and the Intellexa Consortium, which is the parent firm of Cytrox AD, "for trafficking in cyber exploits used to gain access to information systems, threatening the privacy and security of individuals and organizations worldwide."
History
Cytrox was established in 2017, reportedly as a startup in North Macedonia and received initial funding from Israel Aerospace Industries. Its Crunchbase article describes it as providing an "operational cyber solution" to governments, including gathering information from devices and cloud services. Cytrox's CEO is Ivo Malinkovski. A review of corporate registry documents by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab indicated that Cytrox has a presence in Israel and Hungary.
In 2019, Forbes reported that Cytrox was rescued by Tal Dilian, a former commander of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), who acquired the company for under $5 million. Dilian served in the IDF for 25 years prior to his departure, following accusations that he had unlawfully enriched himself. Dilian demonstrated the company's surveillance kit to Forbes by hacking into a Huawei device and obtaining its WhatsApp messages without clicks from the victim.
The Citizen Lab said in 2021 that Cytrox was part of an alliance known as Intellexa, which it called "a marketing label for a range of mercenary surveillance vendors that emerged in 2019." Dilian founded the Intellexa Group in 2018; the Intellexa Alliance combines the Intellexa Group and Nexa, a group of surveillance companies that operates mainly in France.
The public source identifies “Cytrox” as spyware company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Cytrox, spyware and company.
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The record creator and administrative purpose are central evidence, because official documentation reflects both action and institutional priorities. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q122775553. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2017, 2021, 2023 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cytrox” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.