FinFisher was a kind of bogeyman in the security community since brochures advertising the software’s capabilities popped up in a Wikileaks drop in December of 2011. FinFisher could purportedly empower its owner with the kinds of advanced intrusion techniques usually reserved for the NSA.
FinFisher was created and sold by Gamma International, an international surveillance company with offices in London and Frankfurt. The Gamma brochures promised remote monitoring and keylogging — they even said they could listen in on a target’s Skype calls in real time. It’s the kind of technology that could be subject to international export restrictions like the Wassenaar Agreement, so finding it in the hands of the Bahraini government would have major diplomatic consequences.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @06:50AM
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/391114/microsoft-admits-windows-10-preview-has-a-keylogger [pcpro.co.uk]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Gobo on Monday January 26 2015, @07:10AM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @02:41PM
Yes, that finfisher. But that article is about how Gamma lost control of it. This is about how Gamma deliberately sold it to countries that it was illegal for them to sell it to. Will they be prosecuted? We can only hope. Seriously, hope is probably the closest we will get to the rule of law here...
(Score: 5, Informative) by sudo rm -rf on Monday January 26 2015, @12:07PM
I'd like to point out that in November there was an article here on SolyentNews [soylentnews.org] about Detekt [wikipedia.org],
a free tool by Amnesty International, Digitale Gesellschaft, EFF, and Privacy International to scan for surveillance software on Microsoft Windows [source: wiki].
From its project page [github.com]:
Detekt tries to detect the presence of pre-defined patterns that have been identified through the course of our research to be unique identifiers that indicate the presence of a given malware running on the computer. Currently it is provided with patterns for:
Beware that it is possible that Detekt may not successfully detect the most recent versions of those malware families. Indeed, some of them will likely be updated in response to this release in order to remove or change the patterns that we identified. In addition, there may be existing versions of malware, from these families or from other providers, which are not detected by this tool. If Detekt does not find anything, this unfortunately cannot be considered a clean bill of health.
If you encounter samples of such families that are not successfully detected, please open a ticket. In addition, please let us know if you find instances of false positives.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 26 2015, @03:16PM
scan for surveillance software on Microsoft Windows
If you're a journalist or human rights activist and you run Microsoft Windows, you're fucking stupid.
(If you not and run Windows, you're just stupid.)