Hacking Team hacked, attackers claim 400GB in dumped data

http://www.csoonline.com/article/2943968/data-breach/hacking-team-hacked-attackers-claim-400gb-in-dumped-data.html

by sandmansandine • 11 years ago

582 220 11 years ago

Poetic justice. Serves the bastards right. I'm sure hackers are flocking to the download in search of awesome tools. If they're there, then we might see independent, malware authors building some interesting things to produce headaches with. Interesting times continue.

Note that many of us in INFOSEC said years ago that these offensive, cyber companies developing weapons was a risk to us if they double-dealed or got breached. Their weapons which we (and others) funded might get turned against us. Depending on what's in the torrent, that scenario might begin playing out.

themartorana• 11 years ago

Looks like they're double dealing, too. Invoices to Egypt and other oppressive governments have already been found in the torrent dump.

Christopher Soghoian on Twitter: "Just from Torrent File listing, Hacking Team's customers includes South Korea, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Lebanon, and Mongolia."

https://mobile.twitter.com/csoghoian/status/6178628794050641...

Edit - just read Christopher Soghoian's entire Twitter stream for the juicy bits. It's bad news for Hacking Team:

https://mobile.twitter.com/csoghoian

nickpsecurity4• 11 years ago

I posted a link to his stream with the rest on Schneier's blog. The stream is... Hacking Team's own answer to Failblog. I only wish I had 400GB of storage handy with a good network in case it gets taken down or something. Hope people are copying the shit out of it.

Note: There torrent is so big and has so much stuff that this laptop I'm using (few years old) was lagging on scrollbar with fan on full blast. Had to close it lol.

jessaustin• 11 years ago

OMG "I'm going to save @HackingTeam the trouble of hiring Mandiant." then the pic of Bejtlich with "DEAR @HACKINGTEAM IT WAS CHINA". Ha!

JoachimS2• 11 years ago

Oh noes, pissing off abusive regimes to make a few bucks more, I'd say they deserve all they get and should have been part of their business risk assessment.

JoachimS2• 11 years ago

Not only for those reasons, but also for creating a malware market driven by nation state money. The way we have found and fixed vulnerabilities in civilian IT systems has been turned into a market where the end result are less secure persons, companies, organizations and states.

A fabulous way to spend tax money aim to protect us imho...

veddox3• 11 years ago

I'm not usually happy to see somebody hacked, but in this case I'll make an exception :-)

But their software is a risk now, I agree.

sarciszewski4• 11 years ago

Good. Serves them right.

Normally I'm a bit more reserved when a company I dislike gets hacked, but take a look at Hacking Team's history and you'll probably want to celebrate too.

nickpsecurity4• 11 years ago

Not just hacked: this is almost on the Sony level. They got...

H A C K E D !!!!!

Maybe we'll get lucky and they'll face bankruptcy with their stuff available for free now. :)

sarciszewski4• 11 years ago

I'm also hoping for criminal charges ;)

bjterry• 11 years ago

...Hacking Team's customers include South Korea, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Lebanon, and Mongolia. Yet, the company maintains that it does not do business with oppressive governments.

I was curious if those were all oppressive governments, especially since South Korea was included. According to a couple indices on Wikipedia [1] South Korea is pretty free (only the press freedom index is lower than America's), and Mongolia's not so bad (political freedom, but weakness in press and economic freedom). Pretty hard to lump South Korea in with Saudi Arabia or Kazakhstan.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices

delbel• 11 years ago

I had to read that twice and figured I missed last week's Two Minutes of Hate.

agopaul• 11 years ago

Orwell's 1984?

Zigurd2• 11 years ago

South Korea is fairly recently free-ish. Up until 1987 South Korea had a heavily US-influenced authoritarian government with a token legal opposition. The US still has a very strong influence in South Korea. There are also recent incidents that betray a lack of confidence in democracy: http://www.wsj.com/articles/south-korea-court-dissolves-left...

It's a perfectly nice place to visit. People there apparently feel free to talk about everything: The war, the Park era, etc. Unions can be quite militant. But they are not as free as Americans.

the_ancient• 11 years ago

Yes but 'Merica is freedom... I know because we just had 72 hours of colorful explosions declaring the freedom....

curiousjorge6• 11 years ago

Allegedly a South Korean assemblyman created a sleeper cell that would become 'activated' when North Korea attacks South Korea based on a testimony by an unknown member of the sleeper cell who have never appeared in public or known to even exist. They dissolved the opposition group based on a report by the NIS (intelligence agency of Korea with a long tradition of torturing and suppressing dissidents). The same agency also tied cement around former president Kim Dae Jung (who happens to be from the west province of Korea, who have long been oppressed and persecuted for centuries) after kidnapping him from a Japanese hotel during 70s, but just as they were about to throw him over the boat, guess who, American soldiers stopped them.

You pick up a Korean newspaper, you are almost certainly reading a mouthpiece of the government.

There are even more frightening stories during this time. Playing national anthem 4 oclock every fucking day, forcing people to stop what they are doing, and sing, many of which were propaganda songs composed by the president with the help of his daughter, the current president of Korea.

The most scary one is where people just 'disappear' only to reappear in mental hospitals because they got a bit drunk and talked shit about the government during the 70s or 80s.

Plenty of young men conscripted into Korean military would die because what the concept of human rights has long been an alien ideology, basically a curfew and martial law during this period where you couldn't do jack shit after 10pm or you'd get arrested or get a good beating.

Let's not also get started with women's rights, but perhaps the most frustrating is the social fabric of Korea is hierachial and oppressive. Kindergarteners going to overly priced private tutors after school ends and coming home at midnight because they are told the same lie that studying will get you places, teachers beating kids with corporal punishment for low scores on exams, and the constant war drumming of the 'suffering' or 'han' of Korean history and teaching to hate neighboring countries, especially Japan.

It's no wonder that millenial Koreans are desperate to leave the country, even if it means being a plumber in Germany with an advanced degrees.

By no means has South Korea ever been a democracy, the same traditions continue but hidden beneath disinformation and surveillance of opponents.

veddox3• 11 years ago

But they are not as free as Americans.

Oh, give over! As if the US of A were the ultimate land of freedom. With the NSA, Guantanamo, race-based police violence...

[Disclaimer: I have nothing against the USA (well, almost nothing). But I can't stand people talking about it as if it was the only true democracy/free country/heaven on earth.]

reirob• 11 years ago

  Update 5:

  Hacking Team currently has, based on internal documents leaked by the
  attackers on Sunday evening, customers in the following locations:

    Egypt, Ethiopia, Morocco, Nigeria, Sudan
    Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, United States
    Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand
    Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Australia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary
    Italy, Luxemburg, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Bahrain, Oman
    Saudi Arabia, UAE

justinjlynn• 11 years ago

Direct link to the announcement tweet https://twitter.com/hackingteam/status/617852091390935040

mikeyouse2• 11 years ago

They were stonewalling a UN investigation into selling their services to Sudan during the civil war.. Unbelievable..

https://twitter.com/csoghoian/status/617892200618291200

dev-da02• 11 years ago

They're profiteers off deaths, abuse and repression of people, plain and simple. The whole lot of these folks should be in jail.

contingencies4• 11 years ago

Yes.

However, the cynic in me suggests that those who sell weapons to nation-states tend to receive protection from nation-states.

Which percentage of their customers will not be pissed off enough to watch them burn over sticking their neck out to help, though? Probably only the most corrupt, if an appropriate amount of funds are dispersed to support rapid processing.

wslh• 11 years ago

Just looking at the torrent I found Coca Cola, Google, Carrefour, and Movistar. I would love to see an index of this information to quickly search the content.

Veratyr• 11 years ago

I had a look at the contents of the files I grepped with Google in the name and it appears most of them are invoices and contracts for things like Maps, Earth and Adwords.

My guess is they use Google Maps for finding addresses from GPS or vice versa. Or something like that.

kiproping• 11 years ago

http://ht.musalbas.com/

curiousjorge6• 11 years ago

David Vincenzetti will forever go down in history as a piece of shit.

middleclick• 11 years ago

Got a link or two I can read about?

mikeyouse2• 11 years ago

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/8899353/The-spies-behi...

curiousjorge6• 11 years ago

How can you miss his devilish good looks under the hoodie?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R63CRBNLE2o

Just look at how seductively he lifts his hoodie to reveal his face in the darkness, 10/10 would buy exploit again.

dev-da02• 11 years ago

Normally I'm not one for ad hominems but he comes off as a huge poser dbag. The only things missing were the duck grimace and Donald Trump pluging his 2016 campaign.

gruez• 11 years ago

magnet link: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:51603bff88e0a1b3bad3962614978929c9d26955

randomguy4002• 11 years ago

Cheers. It's working with the magnet link.

randomguy4002• 11 years ago

List of trackers

udp://coppersurfer.tk:6969/announce

udp://9.rarbg.me:2710/announce

http://mgtracker.org:2710/announce

http://bt.careland.com.cn:6969/announce

udp://open.demonii.com:1337

udp://exodus.desync.com:6969

udp://tracker.leechers-paradise.org:6969

udp://tracker.pomf.se

udp://tracker.blackunicorn.xyz:6969

HackersLovers• 11 years ago

Where is magnet link?

wowuyan• 11 years ago

能下载？

ahofmann• 11 years ago

I'm on windows trying to download this. qBittorent gives an error message on import, utorrent does nothing (0% metadata loaded) and transmission loads metadata to 100 % and then starts over. In the logfile it says: "[ERROR] Hacked Team: Invalid metadata entry "path"". Transmission version is 2.84 (14386). Is there anyone loading this torrent on windows?

liviu-3• 11 years ago

Tixati on Windows, Transmission on Linux.

lhecker• 11 years ago

The magnet link didn't work for me. But then I tried using http://infotomb.com/eyyxo.torrent instead, which worked immediately with Transmission 2.90 (OSX) and Tixati (Windows).

btw:

The MD5 of eyyxo.torrent is 26183ae8f24e798a15d77dd3476f5ed9

I mirrored the torrent file on my server in case infotomb gets offline again: https://hecker.io/eyyxo.torrent

Vespasian• 11 years ago

Just a casual warning: Downloading this might be illegal depending on your jurisdiction so take care!

curiousjorge6• 11 years ago

South Korea? Well I'm not surprised. Beneath the veil of democracy is a nanny state, forcing kids to install surveillance tool on their mobile phones, forcing bank and military to use IE and wonderfully secure ActiveX (required to do just about anything private and sensitive in Korea), requiring social insurance number to sign up for any website, use your real name so they can take you away if you write a blog post in Korean about smoking marijuana in Amsterdam, insanely bizarre Korean defamation law, polarized view of 'right' and 'left', with left being persecuted and painted in the same light as North Koreans, oppression of laborers, workers working for family owned conglomerates, indecency law (make Korean porno in Canada and get arrested once in Korea), hiding Gwangju massacre (officially a north korea inspired rebellion), silence and censorship of poor treatment of foreign workers (especially poorer Asian countries), east & west regionalism that creates discriminating policies based on lineage, the shit list far too long to go on.

It's no North Korea or Saudi Arabia, but there is active surveillance which seems to be readily tolerated along with nepotism and corruption, because Confucius says you should do what someone with an earlier birth date or higher social status. To go against this machine is to give up the government's version of Korean identity, a constant victim of passed aggressions of neighboring countries which happened because Korea has never been blessed with a great government or kings that always put the country in such predicaments.

meric2• 11 years ago

    Confucius says you should do what someone with an earlier birth date or higher social status

That's categorically false.

In one example in an old confucian book I read - if you are the ruler of the country, and your parents committed a murder, you should first send an arrest order against your parents - even if they protest otherwise, and then abdicate and help your parents escape the law.

This example directly contradicts your generalised assertion[1].

In confucianism - you must try to fulfil your roles at all times. Yes you must respect your elders, but in no way you should obey their commands without considering your own position - and even if you wish to, do not obey them blindly to the point of betraying the responsibilities of your other roles. Don't murder your brother just because your parents told you to do so.

The "in confucianism you must obey your elders at all times" is a convenient myth perpetrated by various governments and parents throughout history.

[1] According to confucianism, the parent always has higher social status than the child, and, the parent could also be a visiting ruler of a much larger country.

contingencies4• 11 years ago

Your argument may be true but it's semantics. The poster's point was that Confucianism has a hierarchical/obedience type of effect on society, promoting a mindset that fosters an acceptance of totalitarian rule. That's hard to argue against.

The major Confucian-derived modern states are China, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, arguably Singapore, Taiwan and Vietnam.

Personally, my visit to the headquarters of one of the major Korean major mobile device manufacturer felt like a hideous preview of a dystopian future where the workers are forced in to utter obedience: entering through airport levels of security on a daily basis, living in numbered cells provided by the company, taking company-provided transport from their assigned residence to work. Even smoking was only permitted between certain regulated minutes, at certain areas. Everyone wore a personalized tracking device used in order to move about the campus. It was hard to describe as anything but oppressive, yet the conditions for those workers are reportedly sought after!

(Edit in reply to below: Yes, I'm definitely in the Taoist camp.)

ttflee• 11 years ago

IMHO, what Confucius meant was that parental authority should be respected on condition that elders behaved like role models. In his ideal, the kings, officials and subordinates should all follow their ethics, like atoms in regular expression, which of course was overambitious like other thoughts of idealism in the history and met its contemporary Waterloo.

CyberDildonics• 11 years ago

In the book I read Confucius said that a woman who goes fishing with seven guys comes back with red snapper.

drannex• 11 years ago

Why do I always find it funny (and sad) when this happens?

Interesting to see that they do in fact work with oppressive governments...

infinitysgame• 11 years ago

400GB dump?! Can't imaging how many 'accomplices' will get sucked into this!

cinquemb2• 11 years ago

"regulations are annoying, it cuts into our profit margin when we have to find a reseller and give them a percentage"[0]

Well this could certainly shed light on the role that contractors operate in ways we have yet to see from the snowden "leaks" (of which most still remains unleaked[1])…

RE: "Media practice of consulting with governments on what to publish or withhold of material disclosed by risk takers, is anti-democratic, unconsitutional, venal, protective of privilege and betrayal of public trust."[2]

[0] https://twitter.com/hackingteam/status/617892908583243776

[1] http://cryptome.org/2013/11/snowden-tally.htm

[2] http://thecryptosphere.com/2014/07/24/cryptome-kills-the-kic...

tptacek5• 11 years ago

Re [0]: TunsmosPetroleum.com is a weird, weird website.

cinquemb2• 11 years ago

Much weirder things are bound to show up in in these files… :)

eyeareque• 11 years ago

The screen shots of the email showed they didn't use pgp it seems. Whoops.

Time to break out the popcorn.

woodman2• 11 years ago

I don't know how it is over there, but legally mandated record keeping requirements are a pretty good excuse for not using public key encryption on corporate mail servers. There are products that act as middlemen that transparently convert between keys that are public and self generated... but that kind of defeats the purpose of public key encryption.

HappyTypist2• 11 years ago

Not at all. Just securely store a copy of all work keys on a non-networked, "cold storage" server and back it up for redundancy. Record keeping is preserved while you gain the full benefits of PGP.

bitmapbrother2• 11 years ago

How can a security firm even be taken seriously when they don't even employ two factor authentication at the very least.

bitmapbrother2• 11 years ago

They should now change their name to Hacked Team.

buren• 11 years ago

They've changed get their display name to just that: https://mobile.twitter.com/hackingteam

palmer_eldritch• 11 years ago

They're probably not the ones who made that change though...

giancarlostoro• 11 years ago

It's been quite a while, surprised Twitter hasn't caught on to this and stepped in or something? I guess it's not necessarily their responsibility though.

lawnchair_larry• 11 years ago

This is actually really bad, happy as I am to see this company get ruined.

People with an agenda are going to latch on to this to further push bad legislation like Wassenar, and criminalize security research, or worse, make it "terrorism", because Soghoian runs his mouth and policy makers don't understand how things really work.

tptacek5• 11 years ago

By "runs his mouth", you mean, "says things people like us disagree with"?

This whole "demonize Soghoian" strategy simply isn't working. People who engage in it sound petulant, not persuasive.

My guess is more than half of HN readers would sympathize with his positions.

sarciszewski4• 11 years ago

I've previously had disagreements with Soghoian before, but he's generally reasonable. He's not exactly cartoon villain material.

dewyatt• 11 years ago

Looks like libtorrent-rasterbar based clients are not able to handle the dump (bencoded item limit). Transmission is working (slowly).

kristofferR• 11 years ago

Damn, this hack is massive.

This seems to include all their deals/financial data, the full source code to everything (including some novel things like EFI malware and possibly some Office/Flash 0days), all their mail, badges of every employee, personal screenshots/porn habits etc etc.

It's not possible to get hacked harder than this.

chinathrow10• 11 years ago

EFI malware novel?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5BrdX7VdOr0

Anyway, serves them right.

Jugurtha2• 11 years ago

What if it was a deliberate effort from Hacking Team itself to fake a breach, produce a torrent file to be downloaded and compromise whoever is downloading it?

The size would need to be large enough that whoever trying to download it will have to stay a relatively long time.

blfr• 11 years ago

It's very easy to spin up rTorrent on some machine not attached to you so this doesn't seem like a very good plan, especially considering the PR damage. Maybe if they managed to embed malware in some commonly trusted file format but that again doesn't seem likely since there are too many viewers, and security researchers will generally be careful.

rjaco31• 11 years ago

The massive PR hit they're taking means their company will most likely die. And "compromising" someone merely by letting one download stuff is at best a gamble, any decent infosec professional will examine this stuff with the same precautions as when analyzing malware.

HappyTypist2• 11 years ago

All they'll get is the IP addresses of the swarm. They'll have similar luck cat'ing the access logs of their httpd.

johansch• 11 years ago

https://twitter.com/hackingteam/status/617951037954125824

"Our network security staff hard at work while 5 MB/s is transferred out of our internal network through his computer." along with presumably is a screenshot of said staff watching youtube and reading facebook.

liviu-3• 11 years ago

His personal twitter got compromised as well http://i.imgur.com/OojV7zc.png

Also, various content: https://github.com/hackedteam (repo with their malware source code) https://twitter.com/Viss/status/617950211239837696 http://i.imgur.com/26jLFmH.png (torrent content) http://i.imgur.com/XtVUiI8.png (torrent content) http://i.imgur.com/W4mzsHa.png (emails) http://i.imgur.com/tdAKXFD.jpg (emails) http://i.imgur.com/3ALTFdB.jpg (their customers) https://archive.is/SYrgc

haakon• 11 years ago

He tweeted

The torrent contains a virus, it's best to let the authorities examine the evidence and stop seeding and spreading false info.

Yes, the hackers fabricated 400GB of lies and please don't look at them.

jacquesm2• 11 years ago

That Outlook window has a header labeled 'product activation failed'.

http://i.imgur.com/tdAKXFD.jpg

chinathrow10• 11 years ago

They regained control over their twitter feed.

Sad.

chinathrow10• 11 years ago

What I want so see now is legal action, anything else is not relevant.

thomasrossi2• 11 years ago

do you think there was some help from the inside? Or just overruled?

danr4• 11 years ago

I'm actually surprised this doesn't happen more often. I think it's hacking organizations like Anonymous that steer away people from "justice" hacking into populism hacking. We need more of these shady & dirty secrets to come to light.

yAnonymous2• 11 years ago

Not sure how EU directives translate into Italian law, but I think what they're doing would be illegal in Germany and other EU member states.

http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:320...

mikecb• 11 years ago

Directives are generally binding, but leave implementation to member states.

evilDagmar• 11 years ago

What I find most entertaining is that they've gone to get help from the police.

Seriously, guys? Live by sword, die by the sword.

Fede_V2• 11 years ago

I do not want to sound shockingly naive, but I wonder how these people can sleep at night. You've just sold software to some of the most brutal governments in the world, who will use your technology to track down and brutally torture incredibly brave human rights activists.

How can you do this, and still get up in the morning while looking at yourself in the mirror? I can understand petty crime if the alternative is watching your family starve, but these are all skilled software developers, it's not like they will have a hard time finding a job.

The people who are involved in this should be forced to watch videos of what those friendly governments do to the civil rights activists they catch.

FLUX-YOU• 11 years ago

Because they're disconnected from the consequences of their actions.

I really doubt they're getting back business case studies talking about how they tracked down some dude and tortured him thanks to the information gleaned from their products (but now we can find out if they did get these).

a3n• 11 years ago

I wonder how these people can sleep at night.

These people are not you. They don't care.

We should be mindful that there is a large fraction of people who care only about their own well being, regardless of consequences.

astrodust• 11 years ago

A lot of people fail to understand what sociopaths are like. They do not, can not care in the way that most people do. The best they can do is pretend to care.

alltakendamned• 11 years ago

Greed.

chinathrow10• 11 years ago

You know, this is what I keep asking myself about all the fine folks in defense, developing the newest fucking weapons/plane/gun/drone/whatever which _will_ be used people in other countries.

We should introduce a "walk away from your job"-kickstarter thing to encourage leaving those positions.

kisil_reboot• 11 years ago

There's a wide range of moral gray area there. Imagine, e.g., a US contractor who builds converters that make dumb bombs into smart bombs. The US is going to bomb people anyway; better that they hit fewer non-targets along the way.

drzaiusapelord2• 11 years ago

A nation's strong defensive capabilities deter action. If Ukraine had NATO level arms that could counter Russia's weapons, there would be no war in Ukraine right now. Instead, their military is all Soviet relics that current-gen and even most last-gen Russian arms can easily overrun; thus the Russian led artillery, Russian led AA, Russian led forces, and Russian special ops making mincemeat of their military.

Its incredible how people pretend deterrence isn't real or a social benefit. Nation state warfare follows pretty simple game theory rules. You'd think techies would understand this. We're living under the most peaceful time in human history thanks to major deterrence, including but not limited to nuclear arms.

Dr. Steven Pinker, Pulitzer prize-winning author and Harvard psychology professor, writes, “Today we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence.” He acknowledges: “In a century that began with 9/11, Iraq, and Darfur, the claim that we are living in an unusually peaceful time may strike you as somewhere between hallucinatory and obscene.” Pinker points out, wars make headlines, but there are fewer conflicts today, and wars don’t kill as many people as they did in the Middle Ages, for instance. Also, global rates of violent crime have plummeted in the last few decades. Pinker notes that the reason for these advances are complex but certainly the rise of education, and a growing willingness to put ourselves in the shoes of others has played its part.

http://www.salon.com/2014/01/15/were_living_through_the_most...

pakled_engineer• 11 years ago

Even if these outfits only sell to "good" countries there's no guarantee those countries won't give access to shady regimes like Egypt or Saudi Arabia to round up and torture political dissidents as these are supposedly allies of the West.

caskance5• 11 years ago

One man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist.

anc84• 11 years ago

People who join the US army should be forced to watch videos of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo torture, they should be forced to watch testimonies of people in drone-bombed municipalities. But I am afraid that for many the "we good, they bad" mentality would justify those atrocities. Like another commenter said, who is bad and who is good really depends on your viewpoint.

5424582• 11 years ago

I think that's a little bit of an excessively simple viewpoint. The US army does much more than Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and drones (in fact, a lot of what you just described is probably managed by agents outside the army such as the CIA). To flip this around, should every employee of a Silicon Valley company be shamed for rising property values in the area that have left many homeless? Should every Google employee be shamed for the illegal wifi capture done by Streetview vans?

tptacek5• 11 years ago

People who say things like this make it much easier for people who work at places like Gamma and Hacking Team to rationalize what they do.

Ntrails• 11 years ago

You've just sold software to some of the most brutal governments in the world, who will use your technology to track down and brutally torture incredibly brave human rights activists.

You make so many assumptions about the viewpoint of the other person and then state that you cannot understand how they behave like this. Of course you cannot, you've phrased the question in a way which doesn't necessarily even make sense from their point of view.

dempseye2• 11 years ago

Care to illuminate their point of view for us?

dsmithatx• 11 years ago

I'm pretty sure they understand his point of view. Why else would they vehemently deny selling this software to such governments like Sudan then?

Fede_V2• 11 years ago

It's very possible that I've made some unfair assumptions. Could you give me a more fair representation of what goes into the mind of someone selling surveillance software to Sudan or Omar?

PavlovsCat2• 11 years ago

Of course, everybody has reasons, that's a given. Ranging from different perspectives (that is, knowing things others don't, or being ignorant to things others know), over rationalizations to pathology - nobody does anything ever without reason.

Yet "I didn't know" or "I really like doing this" or "I can't feel empathy and/or reason well" are not always a good argument for doing something. It's a good reason to not hate a person, but not to just let them do whatever.

Okay, if they're willing to issue a statement I'd be willing to hear them out :P But that's not the same as someone saying they might have a good reason.

digitalneal• 11 years ago

On high thread count sheets, with imported feather pillows in mansions that overlook federally protected ocean coves.

As the famed hip hop scholar Rocko once said "Umma Do Me".

That is how they sleep at night.

filoeleven• 11 years ago

Another reply mentioned how the same questions can be asked of people joining the US military. And I'll add the examples of buying clothing made in sweatshops, hi-tech devices made in sweatshops, blood diamonds, bottled water, and even factory-farmed meat if your concern for suffering extends beyond human suffering.

It's easy to ignore the consequences of your choices when they do not directly impact you or the people you know and care about. I am not crying 'hypocrisy!' here--I take part in these systems too--only pointing to things that many of us do that can be viewed with equal abhorrence by those who pay attention to them. And I think that is the answer to your question: it's all in what you pay attention to.

sspiff• 11 years ago

One mans freedom fighter or activist is another mans terrorist.

Besides, it is human nature to be morally flexible. Many people don't really register atrocities of any scale as long as they don't affect their daily lives.

That's not to say this isn't terrible or shameful behaviour. It's just common terrible, shameful behaviour.

belorn• 11 years ago

They are very similar to military contractors and weapon manufacturers, except that their industry has so far no regulations that prevents them for selling their product to anyone that has money to spend. Government could start defining this kind of tools as weapons but that prevent them for using it on their own population, and weapon trade is a very high profit industry.

JabavuAdams3• 11 years ago

Profit + No personal consequences = WIN

JabavuAdams3• 11 years ago

There is a relatively seductive and possibly correct argument that stability and predictability trumps human rights.

It's the reason Russians can be nostalgic for Stalin, etc. Revolution is messy. If the activists who were pressuring Assad for reforms had known that his reaction and the counter-reaction would lead to 250k+ deaths and the destruction of their country, would they have pushed as hard? Would they have been content with a phased approach, even though that would mean continued violations of their human rights?

shenberg• 11 years ago

I've asked people who work in these fields those same questions. Answers were along the lines of "someone else will do it if I don't" or "it's less violent than the actual violence the government would use otherwise." The reality of it is that you have to stop caring about the effects of your actions at some point: all the stuff we use daily is a product of exploitation and suffering of others with a dash of ruining the planet for future generations, yet we don't have a problem looking ourselves at the mirror.

MichaelGG7• 11 years ago

Someone's gonna do it anyways? So the choice is whether you do something and profit off it (and possibly use the money to accomplish good things) or if you let someone else do it and make the money and perhaps do bad things. Pretty easy choice for me.

In fact, I've written software to analyze VoIP networks (troubleshooting) at scale, and now I'm wondering if I can retarget that and sell to larger entities for much more money. I hadn't really though of it before, but I guess some of these shittier countries wouldn't be able to simply do the engineering themselves even if it's really not that hard.

On a separate note, we should be free to pursue scientific and engineering knowledge without having to deal with consequences of idiots that misuse such things. At least in this branch, imagine if all physicists last century had avoided furthering physics over nuclear weapons concerns. Now it's nowhere near as cool, but the challenge of indexing multiple 40G+ connections at linerate? It'll be fun at a minimum.

kartan2• 11 years ago

Someone's gonna do it anyways?

You can apply this reasoning to justify for absolutely anything that you want to do. And it is false.

On a separate note, we should be free to pursue scientific and engineering knowledge without having to deal with consequences of idiots that misuse such things.

Completely agree. But this people are the "idiots" that are taking the scientific research of others and putting it in bad hands. And what they are doing should be punishable by law.

lubesGordi• 11 years ago

On a pile of money with many beautiful ladies.

cronjobber• 11 years ago

How do you know their customers didn't just want spyware for better ad targeting?

Because, you know, that makes it good.

bobcostas552• 11 years ago

Someone is uploading things to github: https://github.com/hackedteam/

Take a look at the GeoTrust repo...

This is a very interesting file, too: https://github.com/hackedteam/rcs-common/blob/master/lib/rcs...

HoochTHX• 11 years ago

That program appears to creates evidence on the target machine. I hope there will be a way to link this to the parallel construction group. Don't like the guy, plant evidence!/s

doki_pen2• 11 years ago

Looks like they are actively distributing child pornography. They should be charged.

chris_wot2• 11 years ago

How do you figure that?

verteu• 11 years ago

It's probably a dummy value. I doubt there's a sinister scheme to plant "John Doe <test@me.com>" in a victim's address book. [1]

[1] https://github.com/hackedteam/rcs-common/blob/master/lib/rcs...

woah2• 11 years ago

Is it just to have laws against child pornography? Looks like they are actively being used to frame the innocent.

MichaelGG7• 11 years ago

What's so interesting? They have a default value, most likely for testing.

I find it very hard to believe anyone thinks "child_porn.avi" is a compelling filename for child pornography. I'd imagine they'd be more like "<age> <gender> <explicit act>.mp4".

bobcostas552• 11 years ago

It's software sold to law enforcement/intelligence agencies, and it is designed explicitly to plant false evidence. Even post-Snowden I think that qualifies as interesting.

sathio• 11 years ago

yes, I thought the same exact thing, but then I've read this:

better evidence generation

https://github.com/hackedteam/rcs-common/commit/7059fb04a189...

probably those are just placeholders but the intent seems at least a bit shady

Apaze• 11 years ago

Here you can the tree of the archive: https://paste.ee/r/N3rg7

redwood• 11 years ago

Palantir Europe?

HelloNurse2• 11 years ago

Don't miss: the bullshit at http://www.hackingteam.it/index.php/customer-policy

"We do not sell products to governments or to countries blacklisted by the U.S., E.U., U.N., NATO or ASEAN.

We review potential customers before a sale to determine whether or not there is objective evidence or credible concerns that Hacking Team technology provided to the customer will be used to facilitate human rights violations."

Globz2• 11 years ago

FTP link to all files : http://ht.musalbas.com/

Globz2• 11 years ago

This link is part of their knowledge base : http://ht.musalbas.com/KnowledgeBase/Windows%20-%20Soldier%2...

This one is about "Soldier"

nissehulth• 11 years ago

For those curious about file contents, this seems to be a mirror: http://ht.musalbas.com/

nohostname• 11 years ago

i wonder who is behind this massive hack, is it a positive or even worst group?

i wouldn't want to be in the private pictures leaked once the world knows you are responsable for torture and murder of potential innocent people, very nasty karma

ikeboy3• 11 years ago

According to https://twitter.com/lorenzoFB/status/618060756198772736, it's the same guy who hacked finfisher a year ago.

ikeboy3• 11 years ago

And now a follow up article http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacker-claims-responsibilit...

HelloNurse2• 11 years ago

David Vincenzetti's page on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/vincenzetti) features a recommendation from Tommaso Vincenzetti (brother? Cousin?) and a list of many skills, including "Information Security", "Security Audits", "Vulnerability Management", "Ethical Hacking" and less funny ones.

Marco Valleri, another Hacking Team employee, lists himself on LinkedIn as a "Jedi". Nice corporate culture.

antirez4• 11 years ago

I've no idea about the whole story and what Hacking Team exactly did during the years, but I started to write serious code around 1998 working for Vincenzetti, so I think I can provide some hint about this to counter-balance all the hate.

* They allowed me to work on hping, releasing it as free software during most of my working hours. They supported my research that lead to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idle_scan

* Vincenzetti taught me personally many things about POSIX, and he was a very skilled programmer. He wrote, AFAIK before SSH existed, a secure shell that was in use at least in Italy for some time. It used UDP and implemented the reliable connection on top of it in a secure way using state of art encryption. So we are talking about serious programmers.

* Bedeschi, the co-founder of the company, is an incredible hacker, from the way he typed to the keyboard to the incredible Unix knowledged he had.

I worked for a couple of months for their "SecLab", then left the company to return in Sicily since I did not wanted to live in Milan. I don't want to provide an ethical evaluation of the people and don't have enough information, but I can assure you that they were an incredible team of talented hackers.

EDIT: For sure they were very competitive people. I remember than when I left, Vincenzetti told me that it was a shame, I was a very talented programmer in his opinion, and I would finish in my little town in Sicily writing "soccer bet programs". He just wanted to push me to stay in the big city to know more hackers and so forth. I'm glad I don't write soccer bet programs BTW.

tptacek5• 11 years ago

During the time you worked with them, did you contribute to projects you knew were used by LEOs and intelligence agencies? I'm curious about whether they got into "darker" stuff as they progressed.

antirez4• 11 years ago

No, that was a different company. We did plain penetration testings and other Security Firm works like firewalling, hardening. They sold this company, and started the new gig later when I was already gone for years.

curiousjorge6• 11 years ago

Good to know your personal experiences but doesn't change or paint him or the company in any positive light. Sure the boy next door was quiet and friendly, until he goes on a shooting rampage.

And may I suggest to avoid leaving permanent evidence of association with them, some people might misinterpret what you wrote as defending their actions or might think you helped them where they are today, especially when they are about to be hanged, could be bad for your namesake.

antirez4• 11 years ago

I think it's public information that we worked together for some time, however I was never part of the new company "Hacking Team", so any claim of involvement would be far fetched :-) Btw I'm not a fan of eavesdropping on citizens, but I can see how you could use this kind of software to fight organizations like Mafia and other known criminals. So the software they provide is a tool that can be used in a good or bad way. However if they sold to people which are not known by high standards of ethics... and where it is likely there is a freedom-killer use of the software, I think it is not wise to sell to them (not wise or... really bad, actually). Moreover to be truly honest, I'm not a fan for any use of using zero-day security bugs to break into other people systems. I still have this romantic view of security researchers as people that share their findings so that bugs can be fixed.

mercurial• 11 years ago

They are cut of the same cloth as people like Viktor Bout. As a direct result of their actions, innocent people will be tortured and executed. Their technical skill is irrelevant. Or rather, you could consider it an aggravating circumstance: people of this class have a myriad of ways of earning a living, they deliberately chose this course of action.

They shouldn't be protesting of their innocence on Twitter, they should be wearing prison jumpsuits while awaiting sentencing.

antirez4• 11 years ago

I did not tried to justify any action, just provided what I remember of the times I met with them. I don't have enough info to analyze what they did but for sure I'm not a fan of seeing surveillance tools to governments killing people or freedom. For my political visions I would not sell even to US since I find death penalty not acceptable.

stefantalpalaru2• 11 years ago

https://www.privacyinternational.org/?q=node/147 :

It has come to Privacy International’s attention that Hacking Team appears to have received €1.5 million from two venture capital funds originating from the Region of Lombardy in 2007. One of the funds, Finlombarda Gestioni SGR S.p.A (FGSGR) has only a single shareholder - Finlombarda S.p.A, a public financial services agency whose only shareholder is the Region of Lombardy. Finlombarda S.p.A. designs, builds and manages financial services on behalf of the Region of Lombardy, placing the profits of Hacking Team hand-in-hand with the public finances of Lombardy. FGSGR also lists the Head of Venture Capital as being a Board Member of Hacking Team itself.

mirimir• 11 years ago

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai at Motherboard reports evidence that PhineasFisher hacked Hacking Team.[0] It's also possible that someone else hacked both Hacking Team and PhineasFisher, of course.

[0] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hacker-claims-responsibilit...

ikeboy3• 11 years ago

I doubt it was PhineasFisher that was hacked; there's almost no attack vector. S/he hadn't used the twitter account in almost a year , there's extremely little info about them for any attacker to go on, and there's little obvious motive for a hacker to impersonate them as opposed to starting their own pseudonym or anything.

The only method of attack would be to know what email is used for the twitter and hack it, or guess the password, neither of which should be easy against someone using minimal security precautions. (Or, I guess, it could be a false-flag by the US, who could force twitter to do stuff; but that seems way too much risk of PhineasFisher coming out elsewhere and exposing that. Did PF ever put a pgp key somewhere?

s-afra• 11 years ago

How to download files hacking team?

rurban• 11 years ago

The childporn evidence being planted and esp. the violation of the Sudan export restrictions will make a very good case for the procuratore di milano, which famously is very independent. So they will face jailtime, yeah.

thomasrossi2• 11 years ago

Another question came to my mind, slightly related, what is another interesting Italian company to check? I think "movimento 5 stelle", it's a """party""" which makes up whatever, it would be fun to show the fake votes and all.

ophelia• 11 years ago

Results of a static code analysis of the leaked git repos. I hope this contributes to further research

http://bit.ly/ht-code-analysis

Hacking Team hacked, attackers claim 400GB in dumped data

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