Cory Doctorow reports:
Hacking Team (previously) was an Italian company that developed cyberweapons that it sold to oppressive government around the world, to be used against their own citizens to monitor and suppress political oppositions; in 2015, a hacker calling themselves “Phineas Fisher” hacked and dumped hundreds of gigabytes’ worth of internal Hacking Team data, effectively killing the company.
Three years later, the Italian prosecutors who have been chasing Phineas Fisher have given up on unmasking them. On Motherboard, Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai combines the contents of sealed court documents with interview with “Fisher” to reveal the tradecraft that kept Fisher safe from legal retaliation; the stupid mistakes that left Hacking Team vulnerable; and the sleazy tactics the company’s CEO used to torment his former employees in the name of tracking down Fisher.
Read more on BoingBoing.