Watch How Government Spyware Infects a Computer in This Leaked Demo Video
Watch How Government Spyware Infects a Computer in This Leaked Demo Video
Written by
LORENZO FRANCESCHI-BICCHIERAI
September 6, 2016 // 04:25 PM EST
Just like any regular tech company, vendors such as Hacking Team or NSO Group, which sell software designed to spy on computers and cellphones, have to convince potential customers that their product is worth the thousands of dollars, or sometimes millions, that it costs.
For that, companies often set up controlled live demos, showing the potential buyers, usually police departments and intelligence agencies, how their technology works and just how great their spyware is. Unless you are a police agent, a middleman who resells this type of software, or you’ve worked in one of these companies, you’ve probably never seen one of these demos—until today.
Motherboard has obtained a never-before-seen 10-minute video showing a live demo for a spyware solution made by a little known Italian surveillance contractor called RCS Lab. Unlike Hacking Team, RCS Lab has been able to fly under the radar for years, and very little is known about its products, or its customers.
The video shows an RCS Lab employee performing a live demo of the company’s spyware to an unidentified man, including a tutorial on how to use the spyware’s control software to perform a man-in-the-middle attack and infect a target computer who wanted to visit a specific website.
RCS Lab’s spyware, called Mito3, allows agents to easily set up these kind of attacks just by applying a rule in the software settings. An agent can choose whatever site he or she wants to use as a vector, click on a dropdown menu and select “inject HTML” to force the malicious pop]
Watch How Government Spyware Infects a Computer in This Leaked Demo Video
Written by
LORENZO FRANCESCHI-BICCHIERAI
September 6, 2016 // 04:25 PM EST
Just like any regular tech company, vendors such as Hacking Team or NSO Group, which sell software designed to spy on computers and cellphones, have to convince potential customers that their product is worth the thousands of dollars, or sometimes millions, that it costs.
For that, companies often set up controlled live demos, showing the potential buyers, usually police departments and intelligence agencies, how their technology works and just how great their spyware is. Unless you are a police agent, a middleman who resells this type of software, or you’ve worked in one of these companies, you’ve probably never seen one of these demos—until today.
Motherboard has obtained a never-before-seen 10-minute video showing a live demo for a spyware solution made by a little known Italian surveillance contractor called RCS Lab. Unlike Hacking Team, RCS Lab has been able to fly under the radar for years, and very little is known about its products, or its customers.
The video shows an RCS Lab employee performing a live demo of the company’s spyware to an unidentified man, including a tutorial on how to use the spyware’s control software to perform a man-in-the-middle attack and infect a target computer who wanted to visit a specific website.
RCS Lab’s spyware, called Mito3, allows agents to easily set up these kind of attacks just by applying a rule in the software settings. An agent can choose whatever site he or she wants to use as a vector, click on a dropdown menu and select “inject HTML” to force the malicious pop]
