Hacking Team pitches encryption-cracking tools to US law enforcement

Hacking Team, the Italian company that provides offensive intrusion and surveillance software to governments, intelligence and law enforcement agencies, is back in the saddle, knocking on the doors of US law enforcement.

Motherboard reports that in an email sent to a mailing list containing addresses of contacts at various US law enforcement agencies, government agencies, and local police departments, Hacking Team CEO David Vincenzetti has been offering encryption-cracking tools.

“Most [law enforcement agencies] in the US and abroad will become ‘blind,’ they will ‘go dark:’ they will be simply be [sic] unable to fight vicious phenomena such as terrorism,” he warned. “Only the private companies can help here, we are one of them.”

“It is crystal clear that the present American administration does not have the stomach to oppose the American IT conglomerates and to approve unpopular, yet totally necessary, regulations,” he added.

Hacking Team was famously hacked by someone who goes by the online handle Phineas Fisher, and 400GB+ of the company documents, emails and source code of its hacking and spying tools were dumped online for everybody to peruse some 4 months ago.

The leak revealed questionable customers of and conduct by the company and its executives, as well as details about the capabilities of their products and employees, and the company was forced to ask all customers to temporarily shut down all deployments of its Remote Control System software (“Galileo”) in order for the customers’ spying efforts to remain undetected.

The documents and emails also revealed that the US FBI and DEA were past customers of the company.

Apparently, this email pitch offers “brand new and totally unprecedented cyber investigation solutions” that the company is in the process of finalizing. Vincenzetti calls them “game changers”.

It’s seems like a logical approach for the company, as its past solutions have been tainted by the data leak of their source code, and it’s unlikely that customers would have faith that, in using them, their efforts would remain undetected.

It’s still unknown when the company plans to release the newest version ot its Remote Control System software, on which they are ostensibly working on.