NZ gov't hires foreign hacking firm

New Zealand government hires mercenary hacking company

A Italian company called “Hacking Team” which makes surveillance software used by governments to tap into phones and computers has been revealed seven servers are located in Aotearoa New Zealand. The Hacking Team company has developed Mobile infectors that install onto the user's Mobile phones

Mana News editor Joe Trinder

Mana News,

8 July, 2015

Once the end user phone has been infected the New Zealand government can steal files, read emails, take photos and record conversations.

Hacking team offer their services to third world despots in Ethiopia, Bahrain, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Sudan, Azerbaijan and Turkey.

The National Government has installed seven of Hacking team servers operating in New Zealand while Australia only has four.

The National government can  pretend that these spy servers are intended for Police surveillance it’s patently obvious the regimes that employ hacking team have no intention of using this system to prevent child pornography e.g Sudan. The hacking team C2 servers are used to spy on opposition parties and political activists.

The fact seven servers are located in New Zealand was revealed after the company hacking team were the victim of hacking themselves. The biggest mystery is why have the complicit mainstream media not investigated this scandal.  This is another example of the National government stacking the deck in its quest to retain power at all costs.

Surveillance software maker Hacking Team gets taste of its own medicine

Private Italian firm Hacking Team install malware for law enforcement agencies and governments around the world.

Stuff,

8 July, 2015

Italy's Hacking Team, which makes surveillance software used by governments to tap into phones and computers, found itself the victim of hacking on a grand scale on Monday.

The controversial Milan-based company, which describes itself as a maker of lawful interception software used by police and intelligence services worldwide, has been accused by anti-surveillance campaigners of selling snooping tools to governments with poor human rights records.

Hacking Team's Twitter account was hijacked on Monday and used by hackers to release what is alleged to be more than 400 gigabytes of the company's internal documents, email correspondence, employee passwords and the underlying source code of its products.

"Since we have nothing to hide, we're publishing all our emails, files and source code," posts published on the company's hijacked Twitter account said. The tweets were subsequently deleted.

Company spokesman Eric Rabe confirmed the breach, adding that "law enforcement will investigate the illegal taking of proprietary company property".

Rabe acknowledged that the company was recommending that clients suspend use of the snooping programs until Hacking Team determines whether specific law enforcement operations have been exposed.

"We would expect this to be a relatively short suspension of service," Rabe told Reuters.

Hacking Team customers include the US FBI, according to internal documents published Monday. That agency did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

One US privacy rights activist hailed the publication of the stolen Hacking Team documents as the "best transparency report ever", while another digital activist compared the disclosures to a Christmas gift in July for anti-surveillance campaigners.

Among the documents published was a spreadsheet that purports to show the company's active and inactive clients at the end of 2014.

Those listed included police agencies in several European countries, the US Drug Enforcement Administration and police and state security organisations in countries with records of human rights abuses such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.

Sudan's National Intelligence Security Service was one of two customers in the client list given the special designation of "not officially supported".

However, a second document, an invoice for 480,000 euros to the same security service, calls into question repeated denials by the Hacking Team that it has ever done business with Sudan, which is subject to heavy trade restrictions.

Hacking Team did not dispute the veracity of any of the documents, though it said some reports that claimed to be based on them contained misstatements.

It said it would not identify any customers because of still-binding confidentiality agreements.

The 12-year-old Hacking Team was named one of five private-sector "Corporate Enemies of the Internet" in a 2012 report by Reporters Without Borders.

Citizen Lab, a digital rights research group affiliated with the University of Toronto, has published numerous reports linking Hacking Team software to repression of minority and dissident groups, as well as journalists in a number of countries in Africa and the Middle East.

Hacking Team's oppressive regimes customer list revealed in hack

Italian spyware company Hacking Team has been hit by a breach, which has revealed that it sold spyware to oppressive regimes.

Corporate data has been stolen from the elusive company, which provides spyware and malware to government agencies, and is now being widely circulated online. Around 400GB of data has been uploaded to BitTorrent -- a haul that includes directories, audio recordings, emails and source code.

The hackers also took over the Hacking Team's Twitter feed, changing its name to "Hacked Team" and posting links to where the stolen files were being hosted.

Hacking Team is the vendor of a surveillance software known as Da Vinci, which it claims to sell only to ethical governments. Of course the definition of "ethical government" is up for debate -- some might even call it an oxymoron -- and it seems Hacking Team's definition is even more loose than most. Files reveal that Hacking Team customers include South Korea, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Egypt, Nigeria and Sudan.

The Sudan link is particularly incriminating as the company has previously stated that it has never done business with the country. EU law enforces the UN arms embargo on Sudan, which means that if Hacking Team has indeed done business with nation's government, it could be in serious trouble.

There have been questions raised over the activities of Hacking Team before, particularly by the NGO Reporters Without Borders, which has named the company on its Enemies of the internet index. A 2014 Citizen Lab report showed that the company's Remote Control System was being used by the Sudanese government. A 2015 report from Privacy International disclosed years of evidence the organisation had gathered on the company.

"Hacking Team has a consistent track record of delivering its software, including the RCS, to government agencies with records of human rights abuse and unlawful surveillance, and its products have been repeatedly used to conduct unlawful surveillance of journalists, activists and human rights defenders," said the report.

Hacking Team's Christian Pozzi took to Twitter to comment on the hack. "Don't believe everything you see. Most of what the attackers are claiming is simply not true," he wrote. "The attackers are spreading a lot of lies about our company that is simply not true. The torrent contains a virus... Please stop spreading false lies about the services we offer."

"We are currently working closely with the police at the moment. I can't comment about the recent breach. We are currently in the process of notifying all of our customers about the recent breach."

According to CSO Online, the torrent file does not contain malware and Pozzi's Twitter account was also taken over -- although rogue tweets have now been deleted. Pozzi did, however, threaten a security researcher with jail. Pozzi's Twitter account has since been deleted and Hacking Team's Twitter account has been restored.

More to come as this story continues to develop.

Hacking Team, the company that sells snooping software to governments, gets hacked