Hacking Team hacked: firm sold spying tools to repressive regimes, documents claim

The cybersecurity firm Hacking Team appears to have itself been the victim of a hack, with documents that purport to show it sold software to repressive regimes being posted to the company’s own Twitter feed. The Italy-based company offers security services to law enforcement and national security organisations. It offers legal offensive security services, using malware and vulnerabilities to gain access to target’s networks. According to the documents, 400GB of which have been published, Hacking Team has also been working with numerous repressive governments -- something it has previously explicitly denied doing. It has not been possible to independently verify the veracity of the documents.

The perpetrators of the apparent hack used the company’s own official Twitter feed (renamed to “Hacked Team”) to communicate. They continued to post to the feed for hours after, highlighting specific documents they claim come from the hack, such as e-mails, invoices, and even screenshots of Hacking Team employee’s computers, until the company regained control on July 6 and removed the posts. One such tweet, which has since been removed, purports to show Hacking Team negotiating with a third-party reseller to export its malware to Nigeria. If the sale took place, it may have bypassed Italian export controls. Another is claimed to show the company debating what to do after an independent investigation from the University of Toronto attacked it for selling hacking tools to Ethiopia, which then used it to target journalists in the US and elsewhere. The company has never publicly confirmed nor denied working with Ethopia, and in March 2015 a spokesman dismissed earlier reports as “based on some nicely presented suppositions”.