Le Monde | • Updated | By
Hacking Team, an Italian company selling spyware, primarily to governments, has been in contact with the French ministries to try to sell them his Main monitoring software. That’s what show documents published online after hacking Hacking Team Sunday, July 5. Four hundred gigabytes of data from the company’s servers were made or downloaded by hackers, who had access to all the mailboxes of the employees of the company, code-source software it sells, and many confidential documents
Read also:. The seller spyware Hacking Team suffered a massive hacking
Some of these documents show that contacts took place between Hacking Team and the ministries of defense and interior French. After first contacts with the Ministry of Defence in 2013, an introductory meeting was held in late 2014 in Paris, at a hotel near Charles de Gaulle airport to ISB (under the Ministry of Interior) and the interdepartmental control group (GIC), which manages the so-called administrative plays (without a warrant) under the control of the prime minister.
Solicited by Le Monde The Interior Ministry says being approached by Hacking Team, confirmed that a presentation meeting did take place and explains that such meetings are “ normal and mundane .” No action has been given, the ministry said.
The ICG, he continued the discussion with Hacking Team. One of the company managers, Philippe Vinci, visited the headquarters of the Inter-Ministerial group Friday, April 3, 2015. An exchange of emails between a representative of the ICG and commercial Hacking Team, Tuesday 7 April mentions this meeting and confirmed that the ICG has expressed interest for a demonstration. Hacking Team then proposed to the teams of the ICG to visit Italy during May, but the public documents do not give any indication as to the result of this discussion.
According to another internal e-mail Hacking Team, released July 6, interlocutors of the company in the GIC “ want to prepare the legislative change that will take place in France and authorize hacking by intercepts in terrorism cases “. Article 851-3 of the Bill on Intelligence, adopted on 24 June, provides that “for the sole purpose of the prevention of terrorism, may be permitted the collection of information and documents (…) concerning people previously identified as having made a threat in real time on the networks of the operator s “.
In his inside account of the meeting, Hacking Team notes that the commercial Proposed features particularly caught the attention of his interlocutors from the French government – ‘very good reaction body language “, he writes about the tool” network Injection “. This technique involves inserting malicious code directly in the traffic of a communication network, which provides easy install spyware on the computer or the telephone of a target – there is no such need in this case the target clicks on an attachment trapped. Main drawback of the method: it requires having direct access to the Internet service provider’s network
Very versatile spyware
This tool is however only one of the technologies proposed by Hacking Team. Its flagship software, Galileo promises to allow you to “see through the eyes of your target” . In a promotional video, Hacking Team explains that the software is “ deployed throughout all your land ” and monitor “ to hundreds of thousands of targets .” A solution including charge of “ override the encryption through an agent directly installed on the terminal monitor ” and transmit the data collected in a “ encrypted and untraceable .”
Last year, the Russian company Kaspersky, a leading global IT security department and the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, had revealed details about the operation of this tool used According to them, by sixty governments to spy on computers and mobile phones. It would, among other things, to collect e-mails, text messages, call lists and search histories. It would be able to record Skype conversations, telephone conversations, but also ambient noise near a phone.
Galileo would also be able to access the GPS data from the device and also to cameras terminals and to use it to take pictures. Kaspersky had then listed 350 servers scattered around forty countries in the world, used to operate Galileo.
The survival of the threatened company
Appearing among the largest spyware vendors to governments, Hacking Team has not really good reputation. The company has been ranked among the “enemies of the Internet” by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) in 2013. She was also suspected, following several reports of the company Kaspersky and researchers from Citizen Lab of sell surveillance solutions to authoritarian and repressive governments. Hacking Team was particularly suspected by the UN to sell software in Sudan, as the country is under the influence of an embargo on the “arms and equivalents” .
The stolen documents indicate that the company would have commercial partnerships not only with Sudan, but also with Russian intelligence services, or the Department of Defense and Saudi intelligence.
Hacking Team always denied any business dealings with governments accused of violating human rights. “We are extremely careful to whom we sell our products. Our investors have set up a legal committee which continually advise us on the status of each country with which we come into contact “, assured the CEO of Hacking Team, David Vincenzetti, in an interview in 2011 with journalist Ryan Gallagher. “ The committee considers the UN resolutions, international treaties and recommendations of Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International ,” he added.
The company has strongly reacted to the publication of documents. “ We have nothing to hide on our business and we believe that there is no evidence in these 400 gigabits of data that we have violated any law “, assured the spokesman corporate speech, Eric Rabe, in an interview with IBTimes specialized site. For policies of the company in Sudan, he assured that the document offending predates the measures of sanctions against the country decided by the United Nations -. Without specifying how the process of sanctions he referred
A fragile defense, while the company is in big trouble. Monday night, Hacking Team has contacted all its customers asking them to stop using its spyware, according to the specialized website Motherboard.
No comments:
Post a Comment