At 3: 15 Italy Time on July 5 of 2015, a usually quiet Twitter account of the famous spyware company Hacking Team published a strange message:
Since we are not hiding, we publish the emails, the archives and the source code.
The company, and its Twitter account, were violated.
The tweet included a link to a torrent file of 400 gigabytes that contained all sensitive internal files: corporate emails, documents, contracts, spreadsheets, and spyware source code.
Even at first glance, it was a catastrophic breach. So when the journalists started examining the files they discovered the list of Hacking Team's controversial clients, the hacking techniques and the company's relationship with the authorities as well as with government agencies. secret services.
The hacker had Phineas Fisher as a pseudonym. It was the man who hacked the hackers, and to this day has not been revealed and apparently will not be revealed if he does not want it.
Last July, an Italian judge ruled that the research about who hacked Hacking Team had to be terminated, claiming that there was nothing more for them to investigate.
For the investigating authorities, the hacking techniques used by the hacker were nuclear physics.
More than three years after the Hacking Team violation, we still do not know who really was behind the keyboard. After inspiring a whole new generation of hackers, Phineas Phisher disappeared and did not release a hack for more than two years.
But now we know, more about how he entered the Hacking Team systems. Hacking Team founder and chief executive, David Vincenzetti, did not want to update his software, which Phineas Fisher took advantage of, and was able to attack an outdated system.
In December last year, prosecutors called for the case to be closed, arguing that they followed all the procedures and could not solve the mystery of Phineas Fisher's identity. So in early July of 2018, research was terminated.
"I am glad to hear that they have stopped their pointless investigation, which was mainly used as a tool by Vincenzetti to harass his former employees who did not like him." said Phineas Fisher on the Motherboard, referring to Hacking Team's efforts to blame former employees.
Court documents obtained from Motherboard reveal that the original entry point into the Hacking Team network was an outdated firewall system on a virtual private network. According to company sources, system administrators had installed a newer firewall, but Vincenzetti refused to upgrade his own. (An email confirms that VPN was left for "some exceptions.")
"Only one user used it and therefore it was not deactivated. […] Vincenzetti has the ultimate responsibility ", said a former employee of the Hacking Team, who was still in the company on the day of the hack.
Another former employee reported that the VPN and firewall were out of date "because [Vincenzetti] couldn't be bothered to install an update software. "
Phineas Fisher's initial break-in was on 22 May of 2015, about six weeks before he took the stolen files online. Since then, the hacker was watching the Hacking Team network, and he managed to break the computers of the two system administrators on June 6, the same day he stole 290 gigabytes of data.
On June 21, Phineas Fisher was able to access the source code, which was within a development network - the most sensitive part of the company - thanks to a "bridge" system installed between dev and the commercial network, according to court documents.
This bridge, according to workers in the Hacking Team, was installed because the managers did not want to go to another floor to work. With the bridge, they could manage the dev network remotely.
"If it were not for this system, Phineas Fisher would never have reached the dev internal network," said a former employee.
To avoid capture, Phineas Fisher used anonymous links with Tor, other proxies, and VPNs that had been filled with Bitcoin (other hacked) hack.
I'm glad to hear they have stopped their pointless research.
Bitcoin is relatively easy to detect, so it used stolen to pay for servers. This allowed Phineas Fisher to remain anonymous, according to court documents.
"I am ready to go to prison if necessary, but I prefer to remain free and active. No wonder they won't catch me," Phineas Fisher reported. “With some basic precautions it is possible to remain anonymous on Internet. "
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