Hacking Team (previously)
was an Italian company that developed cyberweapons that it sold to
oppressive government around the world, to be used against their own
citizens to monitor and suppress political oppositions; in 2015, a
hacker calling themselves “Phineas Fisher” hacked and dumped hundreds of gigabytes’ worth of internal Hacking Team data, effectively killing the company.
Three years later, the Italian prosecutors who have been chasing Phineas
Fisher have given up on unmasking them. On Motherboard, Lorenzo
Franceschi-Bicchierai combines the contents of sealed court documents
with interview with “Fisher” to reveal the tradecraft that kept Fisher
safe from legal retaliation; the stupid mistakes that left Hacking Team
vulnerable; and the sleazy tactics the company’s CEO used to torment his
former employees in the name of tracking down Fisher.
Fisher’s ability to evade unmasking is largely attributable to their
extreme caution and diligence: using tools like Tor to remain anonymous,
and using stolen, hacked Bitcoin to buy the services and tools that
Fisher used to penetrate Hacking Team’s defenses.
The attack was only possible because David Vincenzetti, Hacking Team’s
founder and CEO, refused to upgrade his VPN software, forcing the IT
workers at Hacking Team to keep older, legacy services running. One of
the systems administrators who might have caught Fisher during their
raids on Hacking Team’s data was reportedly distracted by a weeks-long
World of Warcraft binge, allowing Fisher to operate with impunity.
Meanwhile, the court documents reveal that Vincenzetti has pursued
vendettas against former employees whom he falsely believed to be
implicated in the hack, going so far as to frame them with false
evidence. However, Vincenzetti was ultimately unsuccessful in his
attempts to frame these workers.
