Cyberwar, Inc. -- Private Hacker Firms Turn Email Hacking Into Weapons For Hire

[ancianita]

Last edited Wed Jan 18, 2017, 02:30 AM - Edit history (1)

From last week's NYT Magazine -- an important read:

The White House, C.I.A. and F.B.I. have all claimed that, based on classified evidence, they can trace the hacks of Podesta’s email account (and other hacks of people close to the Clinton campaign) back to the Russian government. But with the rise of private firms like Hacking Team, penetrating the email accounts of political opponents does not require the kind of money and expertise available to major powers

.

A subscription-based website called Insider Surveillance lists more than a dozen companies selling so-called ethical malware, including Milan-based Hacking Team and the German firms FinFisher and Trovicor. Compared with conventional arms, surveillance software is subject to few trade controls; a recent attempt by the United States to regulate it under a 41-country pact called the Wassenaar Arrangement failed. “The technology is morally neutral,” says Joel Brenner, a former inspector general of the National Security Agency. “The same program that you use to monitor your babysitter might be used by Bashar Assad or Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to keep track of whomever they don’t like.”

Hacking Team has fewer than 50 employees, but it has customers all over the world. According to internal documents, its espionage tool, which is called the Remote Control System, or R.C.S., can be licensed for as little as $200,000 a year — well within the budget of a provincial strongman. After it has been surreptitiously installed on a target’s computer or phone, the Remote Control System can invisibly eavesdrop on everything: text messages, emails, phone and Skype calls, location data and so on. Whereas the N.S.A.’s best-known programs grab data in transit from switching rooms and undersea cables, the R.C.S. acquires it at the source, right off a target’s device, before it can be encrypted. It carries out an invisible, digitized equivalent of a Watergate-style break-in.

The United States government is almost certainly the world’s most formidable repository of hacking talent, but its most powerful cyberweapons are generally reserved for intelligence agencies and the military. This might explain why, according to company documents, at least two federal law-enforcement agencies have been Hacking Team clients: the F.B.I., beginning in 2011, and the Drug Enforcement Administration, beginning in 2012. The F.B.I. contract paid Hacking Team more than $700,000; the D.E.A. appears to have used the software to go after targets in Colombia.

Our innovation comes back to bite us. No more labeling people paranoid CT's around here, because this shit's been going on for at least ten years. My oldest son sells firewalls for Palo Alto Networks to combat this crap.

As well, the EFF (Electronic Freedom Foundation) tries to globally promote and nationally enforce the founding hacker ethics historically chronicled in Fred Turner's must-read book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture.

Again. As others on DU have asked:

If the GOP went to SCOTUS over hanging chads 16 years ago, why hasn't the Democratic Party gone to SCOTUS over classified intel to invalidate the 2016 election?!

This election, compromised by a foreign government, is at least as great a constitutional crisis as hanging chads ever were. Ever.

As capitalism's last-gasp efforts cause chaos, disinformation and geopolitical drama, corporate and state cyberwar will continue to be a big fucking deal. Obama reminds us: stay vigilant, not afraid.


https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/04/magazine/cyberwar-for-sale.html

[Blue_Tires]

1. This has been going on for years...

In fact, Assad notoriously hired some mercenary hackers to track down dissidents for assassination early in the Syrian Civil War... Of course you'll never hear that tidbit from the Snowden-Greenwald-Assange triumvirate...

[ancianita]

3. Not THIS "this." We don't hear tidbits around here because of DU's frames for

political discourse that trend to confirmation bias and group agreement.

For the years I've been here, people who post info about cyber warfare have generally been either ignored, or treated as chicken littles, or simply written off as CT's.

Cyber attack activity has been seen as a sidebar to geopolitics, something a department of the military handles.

Until Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden.

A "triumvirate." Come on. These people had never met each other except in the reportage they read of each other. They're Americans trying to help the general public make sense of what their government has been doing in their name.

But not Democrats. Yes, they have political beliefs contrary to ours. So it's tempting within the political frame of DU to dismiss their knowledge of the cyber war world, or their experience in intel, law and communications that many, maybe most, of us here don't have.

This is about secretly collected communications -- bought or sold or leaked -- outside our government about people in our government. This use of our communications and political participants treats ours and other countries' political processes like a global commodities and influence peddling.

These private companies -- Hacking Team, FinFisher, Trovicor, Nice -- have only come into view recently.

They are a newly visible departure from institutional and state controls. And so this article puts this issue into a whole new framework of roguery and vulnerability for citizens who trust familiar, mainstream, officious and 'official' two-party politics. Their products been used to rig elections in other countries.

I wouldn't make light of these firms that offer their "morally neutral" targeted surveillance technology to straw buyers for global players.

They could be subsidiaries of our own intel. But we need to keep our radar out for more info that comes along.

[Blue_Tires]

4. Um... I was posting those stories long before those clowns came into view

And while I don't give a flying fuck which political party Eddie Fucking Snowden wants to join, my criticisms of him 1. Defecting to Moscow and cooperating with their intelligence services and 2. Leaking thousands of other files that had jack fucking shit to do about privacy or civil liberties is a cause for concern...

Before I go any further -- You *are* familiar with Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian Civil War, right?

EDIT: Found it! I posted this way back in 2012 -- http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2012/03/21/meet-the-hackers-who-sell-spies-the-tools-to-crack-your-pc-and-get-paid-six-figure-fees/#4d56ae589448

Now tell me what's what?

[ancianita]

5. I'm not telling you about you. I'm talking about the need to repeat this info. And thank you

for past posting the same content and caring about it at all. My OP's point is that DU pay ongoing attention to this issue.

I read about Assad and Syria mostly through the New Yorker and the Guardian, if that makes me familiar.

Not going to agree on Snowden's character or the thousands of files claim, because no source has ever proven he's given anything to the Russians except what's in his head, since his file access was shut down by the time he got to Moscow. Plenty have claimed he did, which is not the same.

Thanks for your posts.