"Apart from Palm Beach Networks (as it was known at the time), Barcelona is home to several other exploit and spyware makers that are also making the most of the city’s sunny, temperate weather, fresh seafood, and vibrant expat community.

Among them are Paradigm Shift, which was founded by former employees of Variston in the aftermath of the company’s collapse last year; and Epsilon, which is led by Jeremy Fetiveau, an industry veteran who used to work for a division within U.S. defense giant L3Harris that was created after the company acquired the Australian startup Azimuth. Fetiveau did not return a request for comment.

The city is said to also be home to an unnamed group of Israeli researchers who moved to Barcelona from Singapore to work on developing zero-day exploits. The existence of this unnamed team as well as Epsilon’s presence in Barcelona was first reported by Israeli newspaper Haaretz, whose article sparked coverage in local newspapers and news websites.

Other cybersecurity companies have a presence in Barcelona, even if they are not headquartered there. Andrijana Šekularac, the chief executive of Austrian cybersecurity company SAFA, lives in the city, according to her public LinkedIn profile. SAFA has sponsored offensive cybersecurity conferences, including OffensiveCon and Hexacon, and employs at least two security researchers with past experience at spyware companies, according to their public LinkedIn profiles. Šekularac also did not respond to a request for comment.

These zero-day and spyware companies are part of a broader cybersecurity and startup ecosystem in Barcelona. As of last year, according to the Catalan regional government, there were more than 10,000 people working for more than 500 cybersecurity companies in Barcelona, or around 50% more workers than five years earlier."

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/13/how-barcelona-became-an-unlikely-hub-for-spyware-startups/

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