Ituran was established in 1994 by the Tadiran conglomerate to develop and operate a service for locating stolen vehicles using a technology that was originally developed for military use at Tadiran Telematics, a subsidiary of Tadiran Communications. The core technology was originally developed and licensed by Tadiran from Teletrac USA. Teletrac was founded as International Teletrac Systems in 1988. It received initial funding from a unit of AirTouch Communication in exchange for 49% equity of the company. Teletrac contracted Tadiran to build base stations for their US system which were later used under license in deploying the network in Israel. In 1995 Tadiran decided to sell the Ituran concept to a group of investors headed by Izzy Sheratzky. In 1998 the company had an initial public offering on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange, raising the capital required to develop the service overseas in the United States, Brazil and Argentina. In November 1999 Ituran acquired Tadiran Telematics, which continued to manufacture the vehicle tracking systems Ituran was using for its services, for $10 million. The acquisition enabled Ituran to reduce the cost of the systems it sold. Ituran changed the company's name to Telematics Wireless. In 2005 Ituran raised approximately $50 million in an initial public offering on Nasdaq, which gave the company a value of $294 million. In April 2007 Ituran acquired the Mapa group for $13 million. The Mapa Group consists of three divisions: geographical databases, map publishing in print and online, satellite navigation and location-based services. In November 2007 Ituran sold Telematics Wireless to Singapore based ST Electronics, part of the ST Engineering corporation, for $90 million. In 2011, Ituran signed an agreement with Pelephone which allows Ituran to use Pelephone's network to set up an MVNO venture. In 2012, Ituran announced that Ituran Brazil entered into agreement with General Motors Brazil through a company controlled by Ituran. Ituran Brazil was founded in 1999 and has more than 310,000 active subscribers. In May 2018 a severe security vulnerability was discovered in the Ituran system. The vulnerability allows attackers to easily extract personal information of Ituran customers, including home addresses, phone numbers and car registration numbers. For some users it also allowed real-time tracking using the Ituran application. Following the discovery of the vulnerability, Ituran disabled the self-service portal for its Israeli customers, until the vulnerability is fixed.
