HOUSTON, Texas: In a report released this week, cybersecurity firm Halcyon said that the obscure cloud service company Cloudzy has been providing state-sponsored hackers with internet services to spy on and extort their victims.

Cloudzy had been leasing server space and reselling it to no fewer than 17 different state-sponsored hacking groups from China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, India, Pakistan and Vietnam, said Texas-based Halcyon.

In response to the claims, Cloudzy CEO Hannan Nozari said his firm could not be held responsible for its clients, of which he estimated only 2 percent were malicious.

“If you are a knife factory, are you responsible if someone misuses the knife? Trust me, I hate those criminals and we do everything we can to get rid of them,” he told Reuters.

Halcyon, however, estimated that some 50 percent of Cloudzy’s business was malicious, which include renting services to two ransomware groups.

Ahead of the report’s publication, Halcyon executive Ryan Golden said, “It is a rogues’ gallery on that through one provider,” according to Reuters.

Halcyon was able to map out Cloudzy’s digital footprint by renting servers directly from the firm and connecting it to known hacking operations.

The cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which was not involved in the research, said that it has not seen state-sponsored hackers using Cloudzy, but it had seen other cybercriminal activity connected to it.

Cloudzy’s geographic base of operations is not known.

According to Halcyon researchers who analyzed Cloudzy’s employees’ social media, including LinkedIn and Facebook, the firm is “almost certainly” a front for another internet hosting company, called abrNOC, which Nozari runs from Tehran.

Nozari told Reuters the companies are separate, but he acknowledged that abrNOC employees helped with Cloudzy’s operations.

Adam Meyers, an executive with CrowdStrike, said Cloudzy’s business model is typical of several small virtual private server providers that rent internet hosting services in exchange for cryptocurrency, with no questions asked.

“There is a whole ecosystem of ne’er-do-well kind of folks who are in this business,” he said, according to Reuters.