Customers of Spyware Maker Hacking Team Exposed in Leak

Around 400GB of stolen internal files belonging to the Italian software firm were distributed online. The availability of the documents was advertised on Twitter, by the feed of the company itself. The hacker or hackers responsible for the data extraction also hijacked the Twitter account and renamed it "Hacked Team."

The leak disclosed that Hacking Team's clientele includes the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, foreign agencies, cyber pros, journalists, and repressive regimes, including the Sudanese government. 

"Global security research communities tore into the docs in waves around the clock; hackers created a GitHub repository named "Hacked Team (Hacking Team) We Kill People™." The docs showed Hacking Team's operational security to be abysmal, its code to be inelegant and childlike and its email communications revealed a petty, arrogant and extremely sloppy organization that actively endeavored to avoid scrutiny about the human rights abuses of its clients," Engadget reports.

Hacking Team eventually sent out an email from a new account, because its own was apparently compromised, and instructed customers to immediately stop using its software

"@GammaGroupPR," an entity that a year ago allegedly infiltrated another spyware developer, Gamma Group, AKA "FinFisher," took credit for the Hacking Team stunt. 

In a press statement on July 8, Hacking Team maintained that it responsibly guarded its products, and that the world is at risk now that Hacking Team no longer controls its surveillance tools. Hacking Team also implied that companies (like Adobe) are employing defenses against Hacking Team's technology for the sole reason that the tools have suddenly fallen into "criminal" hands.