Hacking Team announces its return with new tools
Hacking Team, the Italian company that provides hacking tools for businesses and governments, made its official return with an email sent to its customers via its internal mailing list.
The revelation comes from Vice reporters who were alerted to a new email that the company's CEO, David Vincenzetti, sent to current and potential customers through the company's mailing list.
A short excerpt from the email reads: “Most [law enforcement agencies] in the US and abroad will be ‘blinded’, ‘in the dark’: ‘not [sic] able to combat evil phenomena like terrorism. Only private companies can help here and we are one of them.”
The email then says: “It is clear that the current US administration does not have the guts to oppose American IT groups and pass unpopular, but absolutely necessary, regulations.”
This email was sent on October 19, nearly four months after a hacker known only as PhineasFisher breached the company's servers, stole and then "emptied" over 400GB of data.
The 400 GB of files included a zero-day exploit exploited by various applications, the spyware suite and surveillance tools, hacking tools, internal company emails, a list of customers and their purchases, and the source code of the company's main product: the Remote Control System (RCS), version 9.
After the incident, the company's CEO promised to return and during appearances at various conferences over the summer, he announced that his team has already begun work on RCS 10.
It's unclear whether the email sent a few days ago refers to RCS 10 or something completely new.
One thing is clear, and that is the new tools will enable governments and businesses to crack encrypted files and Web traffic, a problem that many governments, such as the US and the UK, are trying to overcome in one way or another.
