Hacking Team, an Italian firm that provided surveillance tools to various governments for spying on their citizens was hacked earlier today and nearly 400 gigabytes of internal data was made public by the attackers.
For the last few years, governments have come under fire for spying on their citizens and there is still plenty of information that is not known to the general public. This has led to hackers and whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden to use their ways in exposing these practices. One such attack was made today on Hacking Team, a company which supplied spy tools to a large number of governments, and its internal data was posted using torrents.
After attacking the website, the hackers defaced the Hacking Team"s Twitter account by changing its name to "Hacked Team." A stream of tweets ridiculing the company were posted since then in addition to links and images of compromised data. The 400 GB torrent that was posted by the attackers included internal documents, credentials, information about countries which had partnered with the company and the source code to the various tools developed by the Hacking Team.
So far no hacker group has claimed responsibility for the attack and Hacking Team has cleaned up its Twitter feed now.
Source: CSO | Image via CSO