The UK-based company was cofounded by an ex-Israeli surveillance agent and a billionaire previously convicted of insider trading who was later named in the Panama Papers. It produced software which previously allowed third-party developers to hijack users' browsers via malware injection, redirect traffic to advertisers and slurp up private data.
This practice, commonly called traffic manipulation, is condemned web-wide. And the only difference between it and one of the oldest forms of cyberattack, called man-in-the-middle (MitM), is that you clicked "agree" on the terms and conditions. Crossrider was so successful it ultimately drew the gaze of Google and UC Berkeley, which identified the company in a damning 2015 study.
Crossrider changed its name to Kape Technologies PLC in 2018, in CEO Ido Erlichman's words, to escape the "strong association to the past activities of the company." The name change supposedly accompanied a full turnaround for Kape, as it said it was exiting malicious adware and moving into cybersecurity. However, in the same year, Kape still operated the infamous scareware Reimage -- a potentially unwanted program that positions itself as a computer performance enhancer but which has been known to signal false positives on security threats in order to persuade you to pay for its premium service.
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