The Former Israeli Spies Overseeing US Government Cyber Security

NATE BEAR

 

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 centralise 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, Shur and Bartov teamed back up with Sysman and immediately received $4 million in seed funding from Yoav Leitersdorf, a San Francisco-based Israeli-American and fellow Unit 8200 veteran, to start Axonius. Leitersdorf, the managing partner at US-Israeli venture capital firm YL Ventures, is a prolific early-stage investor in Unit 8200 cyber start-ups.

The same year Sysman, Shur and Bartov also received millions in seed financing from Israeli firm Vertex Ventures which is run by veterans of Israel’s spy units. Tami Bronner, a partner at Vertex, spent four years in Israeli military intelligence.

Following this early financing from investors close to Israel’s intelligence establishment, the company went on to receive hundreds of millions in investment from a network of US venture capital firms with intelligence links to Israel.

These include Palo Alto-based Accel Partners, which has invested in more than thirty Israeli tech companies, including another Unit 8200 cyber spin-out, Oasis. Nir Blumberger, an Israeli who served in the IDF, was recruited by Accel from Facebook to open its Tel Aviv office in 2016.

Other Axonius backers include San Francisco-headquartered Bessemer Venture Partners which employs former Israeli intelligence operatives in a Tel Aviv office led by Adam Fisher. An American who emigrated to Israel in 1998, Fisher has acted as an intermediary between Zionists in Silicon Valley and the IDF, and during the genocide gave a presentation on how Israel can win the online war. Israeli Amit Karp, a partner at Bessemer Ventures and another former Israeli intelligence officer, sits on the Axonius board.

Menlo Park-based Lightspeed Venture Partners, which has backed Axonius with around $200 million over numerous funding rounds, also has significant ties to Israeli spy units. Yonit Wiseman, a partner at Lightspeed, spent six years in Israeli military intelligence, leaving in 2018. Her colleague, Tal Morgenstern, was a special forces commander in the IDF.

Given the evidence that Axonius is an Israeli intelligence cut-out, the scale of its penetration within the US federal government structure is extraordinary. 

The company says its platform is ‘deployed in more than 70 federal organizations’ and is used by four of the five major US Department of Defense service agencies. The US federal government contract award website shows Axonius awards for the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps, which in itself means millions of personnel and their devices. 

In November 2024, the company was selected by the Department of Homeland Security to modernise its cybersecurity abilities by centralising ‘data coming from hundreds of separate data sources residing across dozens of federal, civilian, and executive branch agencies.’ Just a month later, in December 2024, the company was contracted by the Department of Defense to upgrade its system of 24/7 surveillance which oversees all on-site and off-site DoD computers and IT networks, a capability known as ‘continuous monitoring and risk scoring.’ And in April this year Axonius obtained authorisation for any US federal agency to use its cloud-based cyber surveillance system.

Other federal departments integrating Axonius software include energy, transportation, the US Treasury and many others. Data from the US spending awards site shows the US Defence Logistics Agency, responsible for managing America’s global weapons supply chain, is the single largest Axonius customer, spending $4.3 million in 2023 alone. The Department of Agriculture has paid nearly $2 million for Axonius tools and the Department of Health and Human Services has spent $1.3 million since 2021.

Axonius is commonly described as an American company. While its headquarters and administrative functions are in New York, its founders, senior executives, and its primary financiers are all Israeli, and, critically, its software and engineering functions are based in Tel Aviv. Axonius has more than eight-hundred employees, and a search of LinkedIn profiles confirms that a majority of Axonius’s engineers in Tel Aviv have a background in Israeli military intelligence.

The pitch for the Axonius system is that it centralises data from all the security and IT tools an organisation uses into one place for easier analysis, control and fixes. And that place is Tel Aviv, where the hundreds of former Israeli spies working as engineers for Axonius have unprecedented access and visibility into the habits and movements of millions of US federal government employees. 

With this visibility an Axonius operator can connect individual devices with individual IDs as well as seeing all login/logoff data and website usage. An operator can also order an account to be disabled, a device to be quarantined, or a user to be removed from a group.

In addition to this, Axonius has a separate R&D division within the company known as AxoniusX, a skunkworks unit focused on developing new cyber tools, run by another Unit 8200 spook, Amit Ofer.

Perhaps none of this matters, and Axonius is simply indicative of the sleazy, symbiotic nature of the relationship between the US and its colonial outpost.

This would be a fair argument if it wasn’t for Israel’s long history of espionage in the United States. From recruiting Hollywood producers who ran front companies that stole nuclear technologies, to selling bugged software to foreign governments, spying (especially cyber spying), has been central to Israel’s foreign policy. Robert Maxwell, the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, was a spy for Israel, and a significant amount of circumstantial evidence suggests Jeffrey Epstein was also an Israeli military intelligence asset. More recently, during Trump’s first term, Israel planted miniature spying devices around the White House and other US government buildings in Washington DC to monitor US officials.

US authorities, then, have allowed former spies from a country with a known history of espionage within the United States to establish a framework of cyber intelligence access across almost the entire federal government apparatus. 

To put it another way, the US has effectively subcontracted its federal-level cyber security infrastructure to Israeli intelligence.

Whether Axonius has used, or has any intent to use its unprecedented access maliciously, is impossible to know. For anyone with knowledge of Israel’s history of spying, however, the embedding of cyber software made by former Israeli spies within the US federal computer system network should raise serious alarms.

More broadly, Axonius shows how a militarised Israeli state takes billions in American funding every year to build its digital architecture of apartheid and genocide, and then sells these capabilities back to the US. American taxpayers, then, effectively pay Israel twice. And when the US buys back the technologies their taxpayers funded in the first place, they are inviting in trojan horse capabilities and making Israeli war criminals rich in the process. 

The good news is that millions of ordinary Americans are wising up to the reality that Israel is not the great deal for the US that political leaders have, for so long, sold it as.

The Axonius story confirms, once again, just how bad this deal is.

(I am forever grateful to everyone who supports me financially. It is invaluable in enabling me to focus on writing, especially these types of investigations. If you value my work and can afford to do so, consider upgrading to a paid subscription or buying me a coffee. Thanks, as always. Nate).

 

https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-former-israeli-spies-overseeing

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

OUR HEARTS BLEED FOR ALL THE FAMILIES AND COMMUNITIES AFFECTED BY THIS ACT OF TRAGIC TERRORISM. 

THE JEWISH COMMUNITY IN AUSTRALIA DESERVE AS MUCH PEACE AS ALL THE PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD.

 

Albo bows to media, Israel pressure, moves on antisemitism, free speech
by Stephanie Tran and Kim Wingerei

 

Anthony Albanese has announced the government “adopts and fully supports Jillian Segal’s plan to combat antisemitism,” bowing to intense media pressure. Stephanie Tran and Kim Wingerei report.

Criticising the state of Israel is about to get difficult.

Speaking at a press conference on Thursday, the Prime Minister said, “We’ve already legislated for hate speech, hate crimes, hate symbols, outlawing doxxing,” adding the government would implement all 13 recommendations “in consultation with the Jewish community and the envoy.” His words hint at a cop-out with a bit of wriggle-room.

The 13 recommendations he refers to are from Anti-Semitism Envoy Jillian Segal’s report, presented in July this year, including the adoption of the controversial definition of anti-semitism by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance – the “IHRA definition.”

Never intended to “chill speech”

The government’s formal response endorses the IHRA definition as Australia’s official definition by publishing a new “supplementary guide” by the Special Envoy to assist its application in an Australian context. Until that’s been published, it is unclear what this will mean in practice.

First adopted by Australia in 2021 under the Morrison government, the definition includes 11 illustrative examples, most of which relate to criticism of the State of Israel.

Kenneth Stern, the lead drafter of the IHRA definition, has cautioned against its use as a disciplinary tool.  Stern has repeatedly said the definition was never intended to “target or chill speech”.

“Starting in 2010, right-wing Jewish groups took the “working definition”, which had some examples about Israel … and decided to weaponise it with title VI cases,” Stern wrote in a Guardian op-ed.

In 2021, the Jerusalem Declaration on Antisemitism was supported by hundreds of Jewish scholars in response to what they described as the IHRA definition’s “unclear” and “controversial” framing. The Declaration’s preamble states:

“The IHRA Definition includes 11 “examples” of antisemitism, 7 of which focus on the State of Israel. While this puts undue emphasis on one arena, there is a widely-felt need for clarity on the limits of legitimate political speech and action concerning Zionism, Israel, and Palestine.”

Burgatory ruling

In a recent Melbourne Magistrates’ Court ruling, a magistrate rejected police attempts to treat anti-Zionist chanting as a strict-liability offence, finding prosecutors must prove intent to insult or offend.

The court found that political speech must go beyond a mere difference of opinion and be “contrary to contemporary standards of public good order” to constitute a criminal offence.

Outside the court, Hash Teyeh hailed the ruling as “a huge win for the freedom of political speech”.

New immigration powers

The government’s response also includes expanded immigration powers, with the government “collaborating with the Special Envoy for Antisemitism to enhance training of immigration officers”.

Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke said, “We will be changing the law to make visa cancellation and visa refusal easier. … I have refused and cancelled visas on the grounds of antisemitism in a way that very few predecessors have. I don’t resile from that. 

And I’ve made clear on the balance of bigotry versus freedom of speech.

Antisemitism Education Taskforce

In response to Segal’s recommendation to “foster long-term societal resilience by ensuring throughout Australian society an understanding of, and familiarity with, the nature, history and danger of antisemitism,” the Government will establish “the Antisemitism Education Taskforce (the Taskforce) to be chaired by David Gonski AC,” the perennial go-to man for aspirational plans.

The aspirations are to encompass all levels of education, from kinder to uni, in a concerted effort to ensure “a deep understanding of Jewish Australians’ history and culture, and a mature understanding and expression of Australian values.”

The plan does not touch on what those values are, but there is the odd, cursory nod to combating racism in general, including funding for an SBS podcast “to dispel misinformation and disinformation impacting Australia’s social cohesion.”

Security, law enforcement and coordination

A new AFP special taskforce is to be established, “to investigate threats, violence and hatred towards the Australian Jewish community and parliamentarians.”

The government has also committed $159.5m in security funding to the Executive Council of Australia Jewry and other community groups, “to improve safety and security at Jewish community sites, including synagogues, and to protect Jewish students in schools and higher education.”

Recommendations not adopted

Some of the more controversial proposals in Segal’s original report were omitted from the government’s formal response, albeit not explicitly rejected.

These include recommendations to allow public funding to be terminated for cultural institutions or festivals deemed to have failed to address antisemitism, or the removal of charity tax status for “problematic organisations.”

See below for a detailed analysis of what has been included and what has not. Only 31% of the original recommendations are to be implemented “as is.”

https://michaelwest.com.au/albo-bows-to-media-israel-pressure-moves-on-protests-antisemitism-free-speech/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.