DEA, US Army bought $1.2M worth of hacking tools in recent years

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/04/dea-us-army-bought-1-2m-worth-of-hacking-tools-in-recent-years/

By Cyrus Farivar
Ars Technica
April 16, 2015

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the United States Army have 
almost certainly been buying questionable remote access hacking tools for 
years from an Italian company called Hacking Team, via an obscure American 
reseller called Cicom USA.

Hacking Team openly advertises what it calls its "Remote Control System," 
(RCS) a piece of malware remotely installed on a target’s computer or 
smartphone. As the company touts: "Evidence collection on monitored 
devices is stealth and transmission of collected data from the device to 
the RCS server is encrypted and untraceable."

The security research group, Citizen Lab, has shown that Hacking Team’s 
smartphone malware has been spotted in the wild in many countries around 
the world, including Mexico, Morocco, Malaysia, Hungary, and more.

The new revelation comes from two independent investigations released 
Wednesday by Privacy International and Vice Motherboard. The London-based 
nonprofit also published documents from Hacking Team that claim it can 
monitor "hundreds of thousands of targets" per installation.

[...]

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