Pierluigi Paganini September 12, 2016

Surveillance is a profitable business, Motherboard has published a never-before-seen 10-minute video showing a live demo of a surveillance software.

Recently, the iPhone hack carried out with the NSO Group‘s Pegasus raised the debate about the use of surveillance software. Who uses them? How? Are we able to defend our machines from a so invasive surveillance?

NSO Group is just one company in a profitable market, to give you an idea of it I invite you to give a look to the Transparency Toolkit, a project that gathers open data on surveillance and human rights abuses and makes free software to examine them. The official page of the project includes tools and case studies.

Hacking Team, Gamma International, NSO Group, Blue Coat, and Verint are only the first names of surveillance firms that passed in my mind while I’m writing this post, but the list is very long.

These firms design solutions that are used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies during their investigations. The expensive solutions proposed by the surveillance firms allows to spy on computers and smartphones, unfortunately, their abuses in the wild are very common. Many governments used them in the past to track dissidents and oppositions, in many cases the use of surveillance solutions represented a severe violation of human rights.

Despite we can read thousands of good posts on the topic, it isn’t so easy to see a live demo of surveillance systems, but the popular journalist Lorenzo Bicchierai has published an interesting post on Motherboard with the intent to show us how government spyware infects a computer.

“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.” wrote Bicchierai.

Motherboard published a video related to a live demo presented by an expert from the Italian surveillance firm RCS Lab. The video shows how the company’s spyware Mito3 could be used to spy on an unaware suspect.

“Mito3 allows customers to listen in on the target, intercept voice calls, text messages, video calls, social media activities, and chats, apparently both on computer and mobile platforms. It also allows police to track the target and geo-locate it thanks to the GPS. It even offers automatic transcription of the recordings”  reads a confidential brochure obtained by Motherboard.

RCS Lab’s spyware Mito3 allows attackers to launch MiTM attacks against the victims injecting malicious content in the connection to any website he intends to visit. The software is very easy to use as explained in the post.

“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 popup to appear, according to the video.”reported MotherBoard.”

https://youtu.be/3HFPUIYUMvo

“Mito3 allows customers to listen in on the target, intercept voice calls, text messages, video calls, social media activities, and chats, apparently both on computer and mobile platforms. It also allows police to track the target and geo-locate it thanks to the GPS. It even offers automatic transcription of the recordings”  reads a confidential brochure obtained by Motherboard.

RCS Lab’s spyware Mito3 allows attackers to launch MiTM attacks against the victims injecting malicious content in the connection to any website he intends to visit. The software is very easy to use as explained int he post.

“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 popup to appear, according to the video.”reported MotherBoard.”

In the video the RCS employee chooses the mirc.com website (IRC chat client) as attack vector then inject with malware in order to compromise the target machine. When the victim visits the mirc.com website, it displays a fake Adobe Flash update installer pops up that is created by the surveillance software by injecting the malicious code. The user is urged to click install in order to proceed the navigation on the website, allowing the surveillance spyware to infect his machine.

I wish to thank Motherboard and Lorenzo Bicchierai for their post that gives us more information on surveillance practices.

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