Mercenary hackers get hacked

Mercenary hackers get hacked

Published 8 July 2015

 

In an ironic turn of events, a group of mercenary hackers were themselves hacked. The group of Italy-based hackers, known as Hacking Team, has been selling its software and services to government and corporate entities in order to test their security fitness. The hackers were able to gain access to the company’s client list, which shows that the company sold surveillance software to authoritarian regimes so they could spy on political dissidents.

In an ironic turn of events, a group of mercenary hackers were themselves hacked. The group of Italy-based hackers, known as Hacking Team, has been selling its software and services to government and corporate entities in order to test their security fitness. One of their products is a malware surveillance software called Da Vinci.
Dan Goodin, writing in ArsTechica, notes that approximately 400 Gigabytes(GB) were downloaded and have been released on the Internet. The list of pilfered documents incudes what appears to be the client list for 2014 and 2015.
One of the firm’s clients was Sudan’s National Intelligence Security Service, marked as “not officially supported.” The list also included other regimes criticized for their oppressive ways, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Azerbaijan.
Other entries in the client list for 2015 included governmental organizations from Luxembourg, Poland, and Italy, and U.S. agencies such as the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the U.S. Army.
Andrew Griffin, writing in the Independent, says that Hacking Team describes its products as “offensive technology.” Their Da Vinci product purportedly has the capability to break the encryption on e-mails, files, and internet telephony protocols.
Among other of Hacking Team’s products is a worm that searches for “zero-day defects,” vulnerabilities which can then be exploited. Such defects are the “Golden Egg” of every hacker, since they allow surveillance and access to any given device or network.
The surveillance side of the company’s products is just that, spyware. Authoritarian regimes use Hacking Team’s products to spy on dissident activists.
The unidentified hackers who penetrated Hacking Team’s network also found that the firm’s employees used very weak passwords, often using a word from the dictionary. Such passwords are open to what are known as dictionary attacks, a fundamental technique in which a program tries to penetrate a system or device by attempting to gain access using each dictionary entry in succession, forward and backward, until the password is discovered.