One of the most notorious security firms which provides surveillance and intrusion software has found itself on the wrong end of an embarrassing hack! Hacked Team, an Italian firm which became famous for provided surveillance tools to various governments for spying on their citizens was hacked earlier today!! It has been reported that nearly 400 gigabytes of internal data was made public by the attackers.
With Edward Snowden bringing down world with shocking leaks; we have so many hackers and whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden who use their own ways in exposing these practices. This time it was Hacking Team itself on receiving end! One such attack was made today on Hacking Team, a company which supplied spy tools to a large number of governments, and its internal data was posted using torrents. For the last few years, governments have come under fire for spying on their citizens and there is still plenty of information that is not known to the general public.
A range of sensitive documents belonging to Italy-based Hacking Team appeared to leak out including email communications and client lists. The hackers, who remain unidentified at this time, also took over the group’s Twitter account and changed its name to Hacked Team, they also posted screenshots of emails and other details. The 400 GB torrent that was posted by the attackers included internal documents, credentials, information about countries which had partnered with the company and the source code to the various tools developed by the Hacking Team.
Hacked Team is a mysterious organization which has long been thought to sell tracking and hacking software to governments, particularly those in developing markets. The organization describes itself as providing “effective, easy-to-use offensive technology to the worldwide law enforcement and intelligence communities”. One tool that it is known to offer is Da Vinci, a service marketed at law enforcement organization that can purportedly access SMS, emails, web browsing and more to locate specific targets.
So far no hacker group has claimed responsibility for the attack and Hacking Team has cleaned up its Twitter feed now. So this is good news or bad, must say doctor got her own overdose!!
