Italy based Hacking Team gets hacked; crucial data posted online

Cyber attack on the Italian surveillance company, Hacking Team, has created a sensation on the internet. The company is best known for making software used by the police bodies and other investigative agencies. The attack resulted in 400 GB of stolen data being posted online on torrent sites and theft of invoices. According to the CSO, one of the first ones to report the attack, the data that has been stolen includes passwords, source codes and a bunch of other documents that revealed the identity of the customers of the company. In the leak it was revealed that the company had the governments of Sudan, Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia as its clients. The list also included police agencies in several European countries, the FBI and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the U.S. and state security organizations in countries including Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Morocco, and Nigeria.

However, ironically in 2014, the company had denied having any relations with the governments of these countries. Along with the previous data, the company’s twitter account was also hacked. The account was then used to publish screenshots of the documents and e-mails that were supposed to be internal company emails and details of secret deals with various governments across the globe. The website of Hacking Team is currently offline and the owner, Christian Pozzi has said that they are working with the police to find out the people behind this cyber attack. Pozzi was active on twitter till Monday after which he deleted the account. According to the reports, many of the passwords like “Passw0rd” and “Rite1” are quite weak and could be easily broken. The use of such weak passwords is quite rare as most of the online surveillance or other websites go for more complex passwords which proved to be a plus point in times like this.

Earlier Pozzi had tweeted,” We haven’t broken any laws. We simply provide custom software solutions tailored to our customers’ needs. A lot of what the attackers are claiming regarding our company is not true,” Cyber attacks have become quite frequent but it is a rare event when a hacking and surveillance company themselves gets hacked. This shows the audacity and the grit of the hackers. The company is doing whatever it can to trace the origins of the hack.