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Hacking Team Is Still Alive Thanks to a Mysterious Investor From Saudi Arabia
[Motherboard.vice] An investor from Saudi Arabia is apparently behind a company that bought a stake in the controversial spyware vendor.The 2015 breach of spyware vendor Hacking Team seemed like it should have ended the company. Hacking Team was thoroughly owned, with its once-secret list of customers, internal emails, and spyware source code leaked online for anyone to see. But nearly three years later, the company trudges on, in large part thanks to a cash influx in 2016 from a mysterious investor who had been publicly unknown until now. The hack hurt the company’s reputation and bottom line: Hacking Team lost customers, was struggling to make new ones, and several key employees left. Three years later—after the appearance of this new investor—the company appears to have stopped the bleeding. The company registered around $1 million in losses in 2015, but bounced back with around $600,000 in profits in 2016. Motherboard has learned that this apparent recovery is in part thanks to the new investor, who appears to be from Saudi Arabia—and whose lawyer’s name matches that of a prominent Saudi attorney who regularly works for the Saudi Arabian government and facilitates deals between the government and international companies. Hacking Team sells hacking and surveillance technologies exclusively to government authorities. And it became infamous for selling its wares to authoritarian regimes such as Ethiopia, Sudan, Kazakhstan, and Bahrain, among others. According to financial records obtained by Motherboard, a company based in Cyprus called Tablem Limited took control of 20 percent of the equity of Hacking Team as of 2016, equivalent to around 44,000 euros (about $55,000) of the company’s total nominal share value, which at the time was 223,572 euros (around $280,000). This investment came a few months after the damaging hack, when the 15-year-old company was hitting rock bottom and its enduring survival seemed unlikely. WHO IS BEHIND TABLEM LIMITED? The reason why Saudi investors, and by proxy, the Saudi Arabian government might have still been interested in Hacking Team’s surveillance technology even after the hack can be explained by the geopolitics of the region. The Saudi government is in the middle of a messy transition, and its rulers are worried about terrorism, Iran, and dissidents among their own citizens, giving them plenty of reason to seek surveillance tools. Ever since the Arab Spring, the country’s ruling class has expanded its crackdown on freedom of expression, according to Amnesty International’s researcher May Romanos. “What drives this crackdown is fear of dissent, fear of political opponents and fear of freedom of expression,” Romanos told me in a phone call, adding that Amnesty has heard reports of activists having their email accounts hacked. Posted by: 3dc 2018-02-02 |
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