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The Fbi Spent $775k On Hacking Team's Spy Tools Since 2011
[WIRED] THE FBI IS one of the clients who bought hacking software from the private Italian spying agency Hacking Team, which was itself the victim of a recent hack. It's long been suspected that the FBI used Hacking Team's tools, but with the publication yesterday of internal documents, invoices, emails and even product source code from the company, we now have the first concrete evidence that this is true.

The FBI is not in good company here. According to several spreadsheets within the hacked archive, which contain a list of Hacking Team's customers, many of the other governments who bought the same software are repressive regimes, such as Sudan and Bahrain. The documents show that the FBI first purchased the company's "RCS" in 2011. RCS stands for "Remote Control Service," otherwise known as "Galileo," Hacking Team's premiere spy product.

RCS is a simple piece of hacking software that has been used by the Æthiopian regime to target journalists based in Washington DC. It has also been detected in an attack on a Moroccan media outlet, and a human rights
One man's rights are another man's existential threat.
 activist from the United Arab Emirates.

Once a target's computer has been infected, RCS is able to siphon off data, and listen in on communications before they have been encrypted. According to researchers based at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, who have monitored the use of RCS throughout the world, the tool can also "record Skype calls, e-mails, instant messages, and passwords typed into a Web browser." To top that off, RCS is also capable of switching on a target's web camera and microphone.

Posted by: Fred 2015-07-07
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=422544