A new hacking video demo has shown how government hacking usually works. The new 10 minute video was obtained by news website, Motherboard, which shows an Italian surveillance contractor, going by the name RCS Lab. In the demo, the contractor showed a hacking tool that has been in use, utilized by the police forces and other various law enforcement agencies. The demo also showed that cops do not need to have expert knowledge on hacking to remove huge amounts of information from a computer they would have targeted.
https://youtu.be/3HFPUIYUMvo
In the video, a software product produced by the RCS Labs itself is seen, and it is called Mito3. This software gives whoever is behind it the opportunity to set up these different kinds of attacks with relative ease. All they have to do is to apply a rule which will be contained in the software settings. If you go on the website of the contractor, there is a description for the software and it notes that it is a monitoring center, which would be able to retrieve, decode, process and store the contents that would come in from virtually any kind of communication network.
The one behind the software is able to select any site they want to be used as a vector, click on a drop down menu which would be available and after that inject an HTML into the innocent looking website. This will create a malicious popup on the victims’ laptop which would then prompt them to download the Flash update. A fake update will appear on the screen so that the user will be appeased, but the device is essentially hacker at that point. Once the fake Flash update is downloaded, the spyware would have been already downloaded.
In the video of the hacking demo, one of the employees with RCS lab says that the installation process in reality is fake, that it makes it sound like a movie. He goes on to say in reality at such points, the device is already infected therefore there is nothing else to do.
Mito3 gives its user a chance to hack into a victim’s computer, and perform other various functions. Some of them include being able to intercept text messages, voice calls, video calls and also social media movement. Chats, microphone, webcam and also GPS location will also be affected. Motherboard also got information that the software can also provide transcriptions for recordings and it gets them automatically.
The technology showed in the video is not so much that unknown, but the speed and relative ease that a person with little to no tech experience would be able to hack into a person’s device is frightening. The video also shows ways of how the security firms sell their malware to governments.
If you’re worried about your security, get yourself a VPN.
