A combined 1.83 terabytes of data has been leaked from two spyware companies. The information on Israeli platform Cellebrite and its Swiss competitor MSAB has been passed onto a hacktivism collective by an anonymous whistleblower.
Hacktivism gang Enlace Hacktivista and non-profit whistleblower news site Distributed-denial-of-Secrets (DDoSecrets) have published the information in full. The companies say no sensitive data was leaked and their systems remain secure.
Enlace Hacktivista, which is thought to operate out of central and Latin America, said in a brief statement: “An anonymous whistleblower sent us phone forensics software and documentation from Cellebrite and MSAB. These companies sell to police and governments around the world who use it to collect information from the phones of journalists, activists and dissidents. Both companies’ software is well documented as being used in human rights abuses.”
So-called ‘phone forensics’ programmes are a form of advanced spyware similar to Pegasus, developed by another Israeli company, the NSO Group.
Analysis of the data has revealed that 103GB was released from MSAB leaving 1.7 terabytes of data leaked from Cellebrite. It is thought to contain details of the spyware systems themselves, as well as technical documentation and some customer documents, though information on the identify of clients does not appear to be part of the database.
This is the second hacktivism attack...
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