Data leak reveals how much Thailand spends on hacking

BANGKOK:-- On July 5, a cybersecurity firm called The Hacking Team itself became the victim of a cyberattack when hackers accessed the servers of the Milan based organisation.

Following the hack, more than 400GB of data relating to the company’s operations was released into the public domain.

The Hacking Team, which says it provides “tools to police organisations and other government agencies that can prevent crimes or terrorism” offers a wide range of services to governments and law enforcement organisations that can be used to gain access to a particular computer, collect private data or install malware or other vulnerabilities on to a network.

Data leaked following the cyber attack has revealed that Thailand, along with several other Southeast Asian countries have used the services of the Hacking Team.

According to a report on the Asia Sentinel website, Thailand spent US$466,482 on the The Hacking Team’s services.

Pic: Asia Sentinel

Other ASEAN countries were also clients of The Hacking Team, with Malaysia paying The Hacking Team US$1,861,131, whilst Singapore paid The Hacking Team US$1,209,963. Vietnam paid US$560,735.

Documents leaked also claim that The Hacking Team has sold its products and services to a number of repressive regimes around the world, including the Sudanese intelligence service. This was despite the company previously denying it ever worked with any repressive regimes.

However, it is important to say that despite widespread coverage in the days following the cyber attack, the authenticity of the leaked data is yet to be verified.

The Guardian reports how Christian Pozzi, an employee of the The Hacking Team tweeted that the documents contained a lot of “false lies” about what the company does and the services it offers.

“A lot of what the attackers are claiming regarding our company is not true. Please stop spreading false lies about the services we offer,” read a tweet from Pozzi.

Pozzi Twitter feed was later hacked and the account deleted.

Arguably the biggest vulnerability to be revealed following the hack was the discovery of a huge security flaw in Adobe Flash player.

The flaw, which could potentially have affected more than one billion computers around the world, can be used to allow someone to take control of a computer and access any files stored locally on the device.

On Tuesday, Mozilla, the company behind the Firefox web browser announced that it had blocked all versions of Adobe Flash by default following the discovery of the vulnerability.

Read more: http://tech.thaivisa.com/data-leak-reveals-how-much-thailand-spends-on-hacking-its-citizens/12513/

"Please stop spreading false lies about the services we offer"..............so, only truths are being spread it seems!

I'm glad that Lebanon and Brazil were included in the graph.

The hackers have been hacked!!!!

This is why we can't have nice things.

Well, at least I updated my Adobe Flash Player. The WWW is getting more and more unsafe.

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