The Hacking Team Hack

Could the Hacking Team compromise hurt you or your company?

If you haven’t updated your computer or software in awhile, now is a good time to do so.  On July 5th an Italian company called Hacking Team had 400 gigabytes of their confidential data posted to the public by an unknown individual.  If Hacking Team was a normal tech company this breach probably wouldn’t matter to you.  Unfortunately Hacking Team’s business was to create malware for governments and law enforcement agencies so they could monitor the communications of Internet users.

When the breach went public Wikileaks set up a way to search all of the breached Hacking Team emails.  If you or your company has a popular software product or service you may want to search the database for your product name just in case.

After security researchers began to go through the Hacking Team data in detail they began to find many different zero-day vulnerabilities for many different things.  For example Adobe Flash and Internet Explorer both had unknown vulnerabilities that Hacking Team was selling to governments and law enforcement organizations to monitor people of interest.

Can the Hacking Team breach cause problems for you?  Yes it can if you don’t update your computer and software to the latest versions.  Now that the zero-day vulnerabilities are public knowledge it’s possible for other malicious groups to start using these vulnerabilities for malware and spyware.

Today is a good day to run Windows update along with updating Adobe Flash if you haven’t already.  Also, it may not be a bad idea to uninstall Flash and get rid of it completely.  We blogged about ways to remove Flash yet still access Flash content several months ago.  And of course using GlassWire to keep an eye on your network activity is another great way to see what your computer is doing over the network.