A surveillance tech firm known as Hacking Team, which has many high-profile government clients, is getting a taste of its own medicine.
The Italian company, which sells surveillance tools to government and law enforcement agencies, was hacked over the weekend. Attackers defaced the Hacking Team Twitter account and posted a link to a torrent file containing 400GB of the company's internal documents.
The data dump reveals details about Hacking Team's clients, source code, and email communications. Based on these internal documents, CSO reported that Hacking Team has customers in the U.S., Egypt, Ethiopia, Morocco, Nigeria, Sudan, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mongolia, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Australia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Luxemburg, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
Screen shots of the leaked documents posted by CSO suggest that Hacking Team's U.S. clients include the FBI and Drug Enforcement Agency.
At this point, no person or group has taken responsibility for the attack, but as security expert Graham Cluley pointed out "this Milan-based company has no shortage of online enemies around the world." Reporters Without Borders included Hacking Team on its list of Enemies of the Internet due to its shady business practices and surveillance tool called DaVinci, which can apparently break encryption on emails, files, and Internet telephony protocols.
Though Hacking Team describes itself as a lawful maker of offensive technology, evidence is mounting that the company isn't being entirely truthful. The 400GB data cache, for instance, includes a contract with Sudan dated July 2, 2012 valued at 480,000 Euro.
"The link to Sudan is especially newsworthy as the company previously stated they've never done business with the nation," CSO notes. "There is a UN arms embargo on the Sudan, which is covered by EU and UK law. If they were doing business with the Sudanese government, Hacking Team could be in hot water."
Hacking Team has said it's working with law enforcement on the matter, and maintains that it has not done anything illegal.
"The people responsible for this will be arrested," one of the company's employees, Christian Pozzi, said, according to CSO. "We are working with the police at the moment."
"Don't believe everything you see," he added. "Most of what the attackers are claiming is simply not true...The attackers are spreading a lot of lies about our company that is simply not true. The torrent contains a virus."