In a final report titled, “Threat Report on the Surveillance-for-Hire Industry,” following an investigation lasting several months, Meta said that it has taken action against “seven entities providing surveillance-for-hire services to target people across the internet.”

“The global surveillance-for-hire industry targets people to collect intelligence, manipulate and compromise their devices and accounts across the internet,” the report said. “While these ‘cyber mercenaries’ often claim that their services only target criminals and terrorists, our months-long investigation concluded that targeting is in fact indiscriminate and includes journalists, dissidents, critics of authoritarian regimes, families of opposition members and human rights activists.”

In the report, Meta said that the Israeli spyware company NSO Group, which it previously sued, is “only one piece of a much broader global cyber mercenary ecosystem.”

According to the report, investigators at Meta discovered that these different surveillance entities used three different tactics to target victims, which it identified as: reconnaissance, engagement and exploitation.

“These surveillance providers are based in China, Israel, India, and North Macedonia. They targeted people in over 100 countries around the world on behalf of their clients,” the report said.

The seven surveillance entities that had accounts removed by Meta were identified as Cobwebs Technologies, Cognyte, Black Cube, Bluehawk CI, BellTroX, Cytrox and “An unknown entity in China.”

According to the report, the accounts removed by Meta, violated Facebook’s community standards and terms of service, by acting as “surveillance-for-hire” entities.

The Washington Post reported that the NSO Group’s Pegasus software and other spyware software, allow hackers to remotely operate phones and computers of specific victims, and won’t be detected by the victim.

In August, the Post and several other news organizations published a report entitled “The Pegasus Project,” which claimed that the NSO Group’s spyware software was used to hack 37 mobile phones of human rights activists and journalists. The report also said that the software was discovered on phones belonging to two women close to Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who was murdered in 2018.

In November, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that it was blacklisting the NSO group, stating that it engaged “in activities that are contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States.”

“NSO Group and Candiru (Israel) were added to the Entity List based on evidence that these entities developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics, and embassy workers,” the U.S. Department of Commerce said in November.

Newsweek was directed to the Meta report after reaching out to Facebook for comment.