Hacking Team sold Spyware to 21 Countries; Targeting Journalists and Human Right Activists !!! Citizen lab, a nonprofit research lab has found traces of a remote hacking tool in 21 countries, developed by Hacking Team, including Ethiopia, Sudan, Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia, which the team had already denied back in 2013. Hacking Team, also known as HT S.r.l, is an Italian company, which is known for its powerful surveillance software, Remote Code System (RCS) that it sells to Governments and law enforcement agencies. Senior Counsel of Hacking Team, Eric Rabe stated that the company does not provide its products to repressive regimes. Remote Control System (RCS) is a malware, can be defined as instrument of crime, infects computers and Smartphones in order to enable covert surveillance. The company claims that its Trojan once installed in the victims’ computer, can intercept encrypted communication, including emails and Skype voice calls. Furthermore, RCS can turn on a device’s webcam and microphone to spy on the user without their knowledge. The Team prominently advertises that their RCS spyware is untraceable to a specific government operator and can be installed remotely. They say that it can scale up to monitor hundreds of thousands of targets and is capable of being deployed to Apple, Android, Symbian, and Blackberry mobile devices. The researchers at Citizen Lab have found traces of Remote Control System (RCS) by mapping the spywares network of proxy servers, which the Hacking Team claims that RCS is untraceable. On the basis of tracing endpoints of Hacking Team proxy chains, the researchers suspected that the agencies of 21 Governments are current or former Clients of RCS, and the country names are Azerbaijan, Colombia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Panama, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, Uzbekistan, including Italy which is the homeland of the Hacking Team. The Governments are targeting for political advantage, including the US-based news Organization, rather than using it for legitimate law enforcement operations. According to researchers at Citizen Lab, The No.1 suspect is Ethiopian Government, that used the hacking tool created by Hacking Team to carry out the spying operation against the Ethiopian journalists in the United States and Europe.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 13:50:04 +0000
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