Dual-use goods: 320 applications to export cyber surveillance products in the EU in 2024

In 2024, the volume of authorised trade of products dual-use – goods designed for civilian use but which can also be used for military purposes – amounted to 77.6 billion euros: a slight increase compared with the 71 billion of the previous year. However, 487 transactions – with a total value of 200 million – were blocked due to security risks associated with their end-use. This is stated in the European Commission’s Report to the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, published on 25 June 2026.

In numerical terms, this amounts to 133,470 authorisations and notifications: the majority of which are EU general export authorisations (89,388), followed by national general export authorisations (23,406) and specific licences (18,549). In terms of economic value, however, the licences with the greatest impact were global export authorisations: €36.5 billion, accounting for 47 per cent of the total authorised. In second and third place, respectively, were specific export authorisations (€24 billion, or 31 per cent) and EU general export authorisations (€9 billion, or 12 per cent). In the same year, Member States received 320 applications for the export of cyber-surveillance products, mainly for telecommunications interception systems (233 applications). These were followed, by a considerable margin, by requests for communications monitoring software (46) and intrusion software (18), whilst no applications were recorded for forensic or investigative tools.

General export authorisations, whether at EU or national level, “offer the highest level of facilitation for trade in dual-use items”, whilst specific licences are ‘granted to a specific exporter for a particular end-user or consignee in a third country and cover one or more dual-use items’. Finally, global export authorisations “are granted for one or more products to a single destination or for one or more products to multiple destinations”.

Among the highest-value products covered by specific and general export authorisations, the top spot is held by ‘nuclear materials, plant and equipment» (22 per cent of the economic value expressed in euros), followed closely by ‘products and equipment for information security and cryptanalysis’ (21 per cent). Some way behind in third place are ‘equipment for the manufacture and testing of semiconductor devices or materials’ (9 per cent), whilst ‘rockets and spacecraft".

For this category of authorisations, the main destinations are China (25 per cent of the economic value expressed in euros), the United States (21 per cent) and, next, the United Kingdom and South Korea (7 per cent) and Ukraine (3 per cent). This classification, however, is influenced by the impact of the EU’s general export authorisations, which account for a substantial share of the total value authorised under export authorisations.