The problem, perhaps, with calling your company Hacking Team is that you're pretty much begging to get hacked.
Which is what happened this Sunday, when someone dumped 400 gigabytes of leaked Hacking Team data onto torrent networks (as first reported over at CSOOnline), with that data quickly getting mirrored at several different sites.
The Italian company became notorious for working as a sort of cyber arms dealer, selling off-the-shelf hacking tools to law enforcement and government officials around the world. Say you're part of the Moroccan intelligence service, and you'd like some spyware to keep track of Android users, but don't want to spend the time and money to create the software yourself. Not to worry: Hacking Team was there to sell you that spyware for €30,000.
Along with journalists, users on Twitter, Reddit, and Hacker News are quickly combing through the thousands of leaked documents (many of them in Italian). Among the discoveries:
- As reported by Wired, the FBI paid almost $775,000 since 2011 for Hacking Team's "Remote Control Service," which siphons off victims' data, as well as allowing remote users to turn on victims' web cams and microphones
- Per SC Magazine, Ethiopia paid almost $828,000 for the same Remote Control System along with various other services, including allowing people within the Ethiopian government to hack into the computers of the U.S.-based employees of an independent television network
- Per the Daily Beast, the Pentagon and the Air Force may have also used Hacking Team's services that were sold to them via a proxy company
- Per CSOOnline, the (perhaps non-exhaustive) list of countries totals over 40, including Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Germany, and invoices totaling €4,324,350 Euro
The most interesting document leaked? A price list of services Hacking Team offers, as spotted over at Defense One. Want to steal email or remotely monitor someone via webcam on a Windows, OSX, or Linux machine? That'll be €40,000. Want to do the same on a Blackberry or Android? €30,000. Tim Cook and Apple shareholders should be proud to learn that iPhones cost a little more to crack: €50,000.
The most disturbing document discovered? Twitter user Shawn Webb found a line of code in Hacking Team's tools that could potentially to allow them to insert compromisingly-named files onto target's computers, such as "pedoporno.mpg," "childporn.avi," or "bomb_blueprints.pdf."
The most embarrassing document leaked? Hacking Team member Christian Pozzi also had his work porn stash discovered deep within his personal files. As any employee of Hacking Team probably should have known, there really isn't anything that can remain a secret on the Internet.
