Hacking Team’s software for government technicians and analysts, showing how it can activate cameras, exfiltrate emails, record Skype calls, log typing, and collect passwords on targeted devices. They also catalog a range of pre-bottled techniques for infecting those devices using wifi networks, USB sticks, streaming video, and email attachments to deliver viral installers. With a few clicks of a mouse, even a lightly trained technician can build a software agent that can infect and monitor a device, then upload captured data at unobtrusive times using a stealthy network of proxy servers, all without leaving a trace. That, at least, is what Hacking Team’s manuals claim as the company tries to distinguish its offerings in the global marketplace for government hacking software. Hacking Team’s efforts include a visible push into the U.S. Though Remote Control System is sold around the world — suspected clients include small governments in dozens of countries, from Ethiopia to Kazakhstan to Saudi Arabia to Mexico to Oman — the company keeps one of its three listed worldwide offices in Annapolis, Maryland, on the edge of the federal intelligence and law-enforcement cluster around the nation’s capital; has sent representatives to American homeland security trade shows and conferences, where it has led training seminars like “Cyber Intelligence Solutions to Data Encryption” for police; and has even taken an investment from a firm headed by America’s former ambassador to Italy. The United States is also, according to two separate research teams, far and away Hacking Team’s top nexus for servers, hosting upwards of 100 such systems, roughly a fifth of all its servers globally. The company has made at least some sales to American entities, according to comments its outspoken co-founder and CEO David Vincenzetti made in l’Espresso in 2011. “We sell Remote Control System to institutions in more than 40 countries on five continents,” he told the Italian newsmagazine. “All of Europe, but also the Middle East, Asia, United States of America.” In the English-language press, where Hacking Team has been more circumspect about its client list, Vincenzetti’s l’Espresso comments about selling implants to U.S. institutions seem to have fallen through the cracks. Asked about them, Hacking Team spokesman Eric Rabe told The Intercept, “we do not identify either our clients or their locations.” Whatever the extent of its U.S. sales, Hacking Team’s manuals deserve an audience in America and beyond. This summer, researchers at the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, including the co-author of this piece, published excerpts of the manuals and technical descriptions of Hacking Team’s capabilities. Publishing the manuals in their entirety here will give the public a better understanding of the sophistication of these relatively low-cost and increasingly prevalent surveillance tools. That sort of understanding is particularly important at a time when digital monitoring has spread from large federal agencies to local police departments and as more national governments gain the once-rarified ability to deploy digital implants across borders. Turnkey solutions like RCS effectively multiply the online threats faced by activists, dissidents, lawyers, businessmen, journalists, and any number of other computer users.
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 05:39:38 +0000
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