South Korea, Major Client of Hacking Team for Spyware

According to recent revelations from leaked e-mails, South Korea, among other countries, was a buyer of spyware that Hacking Team a notorious Italian company sold. Seoul, which historically has been practicing military dictatorship, the purchase of the spyware shows that it's yet again building police state. Wsws.org published this dated July 16, 2015.

A detailed description of various communications and sales by Hacking Team have become obtainable from the company's files that got exposed on the Internet on July 5, 2015 and which WikiLeaks the whistle-blowing site subsequently posted. The files indicated that the 5163 Army Division of South Korea (SK), during January 2012, had bought the RCS (Remote Control System) spyware while kept on making contacts with Hacking Team till January 2015. To deliver RCS onto targets' machines, pornography, poisoned documents along with malevolent web-links are combined, as per the exposed electronic mails. Programs that booby-trap on vulnerable applications can be customized and sent onto targets' PCs.

One local daily reported that the NIS (National Intelligence Service) placed one product order for purchasing the illegal software, alternatively toolkits for spyware, to send to thirty more targets during December 2012 via one area technology firm. It was a politically sensitive period when just eleven days were left for the presidential election of high competition.

Hacking Team, to contaminate PCs and smart-phones, propagated the RCS while users remained unaware of the contaminations, as well as used the System for monitoring computers, messaging applications, phone calls and more.

The powerful NIS of SK reportedly used the government's 5163 Army Division for concealing the intelligence services' overseas activities.

Soon suspicion grew on NIS that it employed the eavesdropping methodology, and the agency admitted buying of the spyware. But it explained the purchase was done for examining cyber-warfare technology in the backdrop of North Korea (NK) acquiring South Koreans' financial data via hacking approximately 25,000 phones there.

No doubt SK has been victimized with several cyber-assaults from NK during recent years, which Pyongyang however, overruled; still NIS' explanation doesn't fully remove escalated doubts that the spyware's employment for hacking might've had association with illegitimate operations.

» SPAMfighter News - 7/29/2015