Last Sunday, the Milan-based spyware firm uncreatively known as “Hacking Team”—notorious for selling powerful, out-of-the-box surveillance tools to any government or law enforcement agency willing to pay the hefty price-tag—was itself hacked by unknown actors.
The firm’s compromised Twitter account began tweeting links to over 400 gigabytes of internal data, including company emails, invoices, financial documents, and source code—most of which appears to have been stored sans encryption on company servers.
To add insult to injury, the hacker(s) responsible—seemingly the same person(s) who infiltrated spyware purveyor Gamma Group last year—changed Hacking Team’s Twitter account name to “Hacked Team.”
The contents of the data dump confirms what researchers and journalists had long suspected: that Hacking Team regularly sells its spyware to repressive regimes—including Ethiopia, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan—some of whom have used the technology to spy on reporters and activists.
In other words, the company has more than earned the appellation bestowed upon it by Reporters without Borders: Hacking Team is an “Enemy of the Internet.”
via When Hacking Team Met Bart Gellman : Additional Focus : Our Work.
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