Topic: Hacking Team hacked and exposed. They sold code to steal Bitcoins! (Read 1890 times)

It’s clear after reviewing other e-mails in the Hacking team archive that the firm wasn’t just buying from Toropov but from numerous others as well, including a “Dustin Trammell” of vulnbroker.com. Eric Rabe, Hacking Team’s spokesman, did not immediately respond to Ars’ questions about the company’s history and expenditures on zero-days.

Just the tip of the iceberg in fact.

- https://surveillance.rsf.org/en/

" On 12 March 2013, Reporters Without Borders published a Special report on Internet Surveillance... a list of "Corporate Enemies of the Internet", companies that sell products that are liable to be used by governments to violate human rights and freedom of information. "

" The five "Corporate Enemies of the Internet" named in March 2013 are: Amesys (France), Blue Coat Systems (U.S.), Gamma (UK and Germany), Hacking Team (Italy), and Trovicor (Germany). "
-snip-

Interesting story. You would think hackers would be very paranoid about their security, considering what they do.

There's no UK on the list either.

Unless my eye's are deceiving me.

Attempts to break U.K. market

Police agencies in the United Kingdom have trialled Hacking Team’s technology, and have been attempting to purchase it for years, but have been hindered by apparent concerns about the legality of the technology.

In May 2011, through a U.K.-based corporate partner, Hacking Team arranged a secretive meeting with several interested British agencies. The company was told by the partner that attendees would possibly include London’s Metropolitan Police, the government’s Home Office, domestic intelligence agency MI5, customs officials, the Serious and Organised Crime Agency, and others.

After this meeting, in September 2013, the London police force told Hacking Team that it was “now ready to progress” with a trial of the spying tool. In December the same year it then invited Hacking Team to formally submit a bid for a spy technology contract. A confidential document outlined that the force wanted to obtain “‘Software’ that can be covertly introduced to a third parties device and will allow us to ‘Look, Listen and Follow’ the third party. The Authority will receive, record and playback the ‘Product’ retrieved from the third party on a ‘System’ that shall be scalable, using proven technology that has in-built security measures appropriate to this task.”

But the deal with the London cops, worth £385,000 ($591,000) to Hacking Team, was abruptly halted in in May 2014 following “internal reviews on how we wished to move this area of technology forward,” according to an email from the police, although the force left the door open for a future deal, adding: “Of course in the months/years to come this could change and if that is the case then we would welcome your organization’s participation.”

Since then, Hacking Team has continued to try to crack the U.K. market. It tried – and apparently failed – to set up a deal with Staffordshire Police after an officer contacted the company seeking technology to “access WiFi points to check users” and to infect devices to covertly collect data.

    Hacking Team discussed whether it could sell its technology disguised under a different name, “hiding” its full functionality.

And in January this year it began negotiating a contract with the British National Crime Agency. The meeting was a success, with an officer for the agency telling Hacking Team that a demonstration of the covert surveillance technology “was extremely well received and proved to be a real eye opener for what can be achieved.”

In April, the same officer told Hacking Team he wanted a quote for basic spyware that would log keystrokes, noting that he could “then grow the system accordingly as we would then have the base platform.” Hacking Team was interested in this proposal and discussed internally whether it could sell its technology disguised under a different name, “hiding” its full functionality. The deal appears to have since stalled, with the British agency telling Hacking Team in late May it was “unable to arrange” a meeting.

Because, lack in users who use bitcoins in india..


~Rude Boy

Unfortunately this is going to be surprising to most. I've been expecting something like this to happen, however I was also surprised by the countries listed.
There are probably tens of companies like this that are doing the hacking for governments. They are contracted by the governments and thus won't be punished, but as soon as some random citizen pirates a movie or software it is off to prison. Such hypocrites.
Just remember recently Kaspersky found that their own servers were compromised, as someone most likely to see how they work and engineer malware that won't be detected soon.

Feeling good as India is not in the list...
Anyways, it's like thieves themselves got thieved...

So those hacking Team works with Goverments and spy on citizen and in the same time they make  softwares to steal bitcoin ? Well that's interessting . Is this chart from their hacking earnings ? dafak

I'm all for putting light to conspiracies, but I personally don't think they used this to just take the coins. But it must be pretty tempting for both the hackers and goverment employees to just take a well chosen priv key. As seen in the silk road debacle.

The guy behind the hack: https://twitter.com/GammaGroupPR

It looks more like they sold code to surveil people using cryptocurrencies, not to steal it.