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Hacking Team Scrambling To Limit Damage Brought On By Explosive Data Leak

Posted by timothy on from the sounds-dangerous dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Who hacked Hacking Team, the Milan-based company selling intrusion and surveillance software to governments, law enforcement agencies and (as it turns out) companies? A hacker who goes by "Phineas Fisher" claims it was him (her? them?). In the meantime, Hacking Team is scrambling to minimize the damage this hack and data leak is doing to the company. They sent out emails to all its customers, requesting them to shut down all deployments of its Remote Control System software ("Galileo") — even though it seems they could do that themselves, as the customer software apparently has secret backdoors. Perhaps they chose the first route because they hoped to keep that fact hidden from the customers? And because every copy of Hacking Team's Galileo software is secretly watermarked, the leaked information could allow researchers to link a certain backdoor to a specific customer.

2 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Re:The fickle finger of fate..... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Sure - the torrent is:
    https://mega.co.nz/#!Xx1lhChT!rbB-LQQyRypxd5bcQnqu-IMZN20ygW_lWfdHdqpKH3E
    mirror at:
    https://ht.transparencytoolkit.org/
    source code up on guithub:
    https://github.com/hackedteam?tab=repositories

  2. HT is untrustworthy by bagofbeans · · Score: 3, Informative
    Per TFA:

    According to Motherboard's Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai, the company has sent out emails to all its customers, requesting them to shut down all deployments of its Remote Control System software ("Galileo") - even though it seems they could do that themselves, as the customer software apparently has secret backdoors. Perhaps they chose the first route because they hoped to keep that fact hidden from the customers?

    Yet, according to ]Hacking Team[ Six Confidential Whitepapers on cryptome.org, HT explicitly state on page 31

    NOTE HackingTeam have no way of connecting to or receiving any information from the Customerâ(TM)s RCS installation.

    So, if HT lie to their rather high powered customers about a major detail like that, what else?