The Italian surveillance technology company, Hacking Team, has been hacked and several countries’ law enforcement agencies may have been compromised, including the US FBI, DEA, and the Army.
On Monday, the Team’s Twitter was hacked, releasing what may be “more than 400 gigabytes of the company’s internal documents, email correspondence, employee passwords and the underlying source code of its products.” Following the hack, the company announced that it will release all of such information to aid in the investigation. Of these documents, there is a spreadsheet that includes all of the Hack Team’s clients for 2014, which showed that the company has worked with countries that have problematic human rights records such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Kazakhstan, Morocco, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Sudan. Additional documentation from the hack provided further evidence suggesting that Sudan did indeed work with the Team. The Hacking Team denies any connection to these countries, priding itself on being “a maker of lawful interception software used by police and intelligence services worldwide,” though the investigation will continue.