Privacy bods Detekt FinFisher dressed as bookmark manager
Top 5 reasons to deploy VMware with Tegile
The Detekt privacy tool has discovered the FinFisher law enforcement spyware masquerading as a benign bookmark manager.
Detekt was launched last week and offers users of Windows systems to inspect their machines for traces of known government spyware.
FinFisher developed by Gamma Group International was sold to authorities including Australia’s NSW police; Belgium; the Netherlands; Singapore, Hungary and Italy.
Developer Claudio Guarnieri said on Twitter the tool discovered the malicious toolkit masquerading as the benign software noting that an unknown user uploaded the file to the Virus Total analysis engine.
New undetected HackingTeam sample just uploaded on VirusTotal https://t.co/CI3VD35iiL disguised as @outertech Linkman pic.twitter.com/01aDSO9SoA
— Claudio (@botherder) November 23, 2014
The malware was signed with a Comodo certificate signed by ‘Jagdeependra’ and not the author of the bookmark manager Outertech, prompting the latter to take to Twitter to inform customers to download its wares from its official website.
Detekt is a triaging utility for users who may be likely targets of government spyware and remote access trojans, and not as a replacement for anti-virus. It may, however, suffer to a lesser extent from some of the cat-and-mouse failures afflicting anti-virus tools.
The software is the brainchild of Citizen Lab, Amnesty International and the Electronic Frontier Foundation and represented a “strike back against governments who are using information obtained through surveillance to arbitrarily detain, illegally arrest and even torture human rights defenders and journalists” Amnesty International’s Marek Marczynski said.
FinFisher is a cross-platform tool that can infected computers and smart phones to help police and intelligence agencies spy on political dissidents, journalists and other targets. The Relay and Proxy components are the data-harvesters that ferry data to surveillance operators and were revealed in a September WikiLeaks drop that revealed collection capabilities for Skype, emails, video and audio. ®
Beginner’s guide to SSL certificates
Article source: http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2014/11/26/privacy_bods_detekt_finisher_dressed_as_bookmark_manager/