Hacking Team also known as HT S.r.l., is a Milan-based software company, selling a Remote-Control System (R.C.S.) the next-generation mass-surveillance technology.
They can beam the R.C.S. in over a Wi-Fi network. Or they can send the customer an email and get him to click on an infected attachment, usually a file from a known brand like Microsoft Word or PowerPoint, to a desktop computer or smartphones like: iPhone, BlackBerry and Android.
For less than $200 000 you get Hacking Team’s mass-surveillance technology, capable of neutralizing you adversaries’ encryption-based protective layers, in order to track them, identify them, locate them and document everything on their computers and cell phones.
Or the NSO Group, an Israeli technology firm with almost 500 employees/hackers selling spyware to Governments. In 2012, the government of Mexico signed a $20 million contract with NSO. The Mexican’s used to target journalists and human right activists as well as the Mexican drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán with NSO’s Pegasus spyware.
Twitter messages with infected R.C.S. inks.
As the United States government, has argued for weaker protections around personal communications, American businesses have been spreading more powerful surveillance tools around the world. The F.B.I.’s director, James Comey, argued that the encryption built into Apple products posed a threat to public safety since privacy is secrecy, and secrecy is terrorism.
Hacking Team software turned up on the devices of activists in Morocco and the United Arab Emirates, as well as an Ethiopian-American journalist in Alexandria. Hacking Team’s terrifying and political weapons are among third-world governments and European counties, and probably the corporate-world surveillance surveillance tools.
Read more
Cyberware for Sale by The New York Times
FBI and Homeland Security detail Russian hacking campaign in new report by The Guardian
Mapping Hacking Team’s “Untraceable” Spyware by The Citizen Lab
21 Suspected Government Users of RCS in 2014