INTL Italian surveillance company appears to get hacked

[Housecarl]

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Europe

Italian surveillance company appears to get hacked

By Raphael Satter | AP July 6 at 1:00 PM

LONDON — An Italian surveillance company known for selling malicious software used by police bodies and spy agencies appears to have succumbed to a damaging cyberattack that sent documents and invoices ricocheting across the Internet.

Hacking Team’s Twitter account appears to have been hijacked late Sunday, posting screenshots of what were purported to be internal company emails and details of secret deals with various world governments.

“Since we have nothing to hide, we’re publishing all our emails, files and source code,” an apparent message from the attacker or attackers said Sunday. At the same time a massive file, several hundred gigabytes in size, was leaked online.

The Associated Press couldn’t immediately verify the authenticity of the leaked material. Still, some of the billing records being shared online appeared to corroborate work by Citizen Lab, a research group at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, which linked Hacking Team to two dozen countries, including several with atrocious human rights records.

“Early reports ... appear to validate our research showing use by repressive regimes like Ethiopia and Sudan,” Citizen Lab said in a statement. “These reports point to the lack of transparency and accountability around the market for intrusion software. We think that a better understanding of this market is essential for a free and secure Internet.”

Milan-based Hacking Team has been the subject of increasing scrutiny after the company’s malware was discovered targeting a series of journalists and activists.

Hacking Team spokesman Eric Rabe did not immediately return messages seeking comment Monday and Hacking Team’s website was offline.


Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

 

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Cybersecurity Company Supplies Repressive Regimes With Spyware, Recent Hack Claims

By Lauren Walker 7/6/15 at 12:42 PM

Hacking Team, a cybersecurity company that sells hacking software to law enforcement in dozens of countries, just got hacked itself. The Italian outfit’s security services use malware and vulnerabilities to tap into target computers and phones.

A series of tweets from its compromised Twitter account (since deleted) shared samples from the 400-gigabyte trove of client files, source code and internal emails, which the hackers posted online. If real, the documents seemed to show, for the first time, that Hacking Team sells its services to many repressive regimes—something it has explicitly denied doing in the past.

The leaked documents show that some of Hacking Team’s clients are Sudan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, Bahrain, Oman, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Many of these countries have been criticized by international human rights organizations for aggressively surveilling their citizens, journalists and political dissidents.

In addition, Hacking Team has contracts with U.S. law enforcement. Its dealings with the FBI were already known, but recent reporting from Motherboard shows that it also supplies the Drug Enforcement Administration with spyware tools “capable of intercepting phone calls, texts, and social media messages” and can “turn on a user’s webcam and microphone as well as collect passwords.”

Christian Pozzi, one of the company’s employees, took to Twitter to say that many of the hackers’ claims regarding its services are false. Pozzi’s feed has since been hacked and deleted, but not before he tweeted that the company is working closely with law enforcement to investigate the breach.

Hacking Team did not respond to a request for comment by publication time.