Government Spyware Vendor Left Customer, Victim Data Online for Everyone to See

[InfoSec News <alerts () infosecnews org>]

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/vbka8b/wolf-intelligence-leak-customer-victim-data-online

By Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai
Motherboard.vice.com
Oct 24 2018

A startup that claims to sell surveillance and hacking technologies to 
governments around the world left nearly all its data -- including 
information taken from infected targets and victims -- exposed online, 
according to a security firm who found the data.

Wolf Intelligence, a Germany-based spyware company that made headlines for 
sending a bodyguard to Mauritania and prompting an international incident 
after the local government detained the bodyguard as collateral for a deal 
went wrong, left a trove of its own data exposed online. The leak exposed 
20 gigabytes of data, including recordings of meetings with customers, a 
scan of a passport belonging to the company's founder, scans of the 
founder's credit cards, and surveillance targets' data, according to 
researchers.

Security researchers from CSIS Security discovered the data on an 
unprotected command and control server and a public Google Drive folder. 
The researchers showed screenshots of the leaked data during a talk at the 
Virus Bulletin conference in Montreal, which Motherboard attended.

"This is a very stupid story in the sense that you would think that a 
company actually selling surveillance tools like this would know more 
about operational security," CSIS co-founder Peter Kruse told Motherboard 
in an interview. "They exposed themselves -- literally everything was 
available publicly on the internet."

In an online chat, Wolf Intelligence founder Manish Kumar told me that it 
wasn’t his company that left the data online, but a reseller he refused to 
identify. He also said that he plans to sue CSIS for hacking his reseller; 
CSIS is adamant that it did not hack anything, as everything was exposed 
and open to anyone

[...]

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