Hacking Team: A Class Action Against Adobe?

After the Hacking Team scandal, everybody and his cousin is calling for a “death sentence” against Adobe Flash, accused of being the “vessel” that allowed Hacking Team’s malware to land on users’ PC and smartphones.

A logical consequence of this ? vulnerability and its exploiting by several malwares, including those made by Hacking Team, would be a class-action against Adobe that, as a matter of fact, released a “bugged-by-design” application.

But this is not going to happens against Adobe, as against the other (big or small) fishes of the software pond. We are much too “programmed” to accept a software fault as an act of God instead of either a mistake or a deliberate marketing choice.

Will things change after the Hacking Team scandal? I don’t think so, thus get ready for the next viral infection, information theft or denial of service: is just business as usual.

Hacking Team: The True Culprit

In 1999 Mark Minasi wrote The Software Conspiracy: Why Companies Put Out Faulty Software, How They Can Hurt You and What You Can Do a book about.

In 2004 Alan Cooper wrote (and I translated the Italian version for Apogeo) The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity.

There have been, and still are, countless warning about the careless attitude toward security of the software houses’ marketing strategies (take a beta, call it final and release it.)

So, why the “concerned” journalists and activists only blame Hacking Team and Hacking Team-like companies, instead of involving in their outcry those who sold the world a bunch of crappy and vulnerable software?Secure programming and security by design are not “options”: by refusing to incorporate security into the roots of a software project would be like designing a car without worrying about the functionality of the brakes.And now we are facing the consequences.

Hacking Team: Silence On The Wire

Sometimes, what isn’t told is more important then what actually is.

None of the Italian mainstream primetime talk shows, usually very fast in arrange a panel of “experts” to help Joe Sixpacks’ audience understanding what’s the fuss, spent a single second with the Hacking Team case. And the news already lost its momentum on the newspapers.

Next week, nobody will ever remember what happened and in a couple of months everything will be back to business as usual…

My Two Cents on the Hacking Team Hack

What happened to Hacking Team neither is the first nor will be the last time a security company that lives by the sword, dies by the sword. Neither this is the first nor will be the last time that huge quantity of critical data are made available through the Internet.

So, to some extent, there is actually nothing new under the sun in the fact itself. This is why – putting aside the legal issues involved – I can hardly understand all the rants aimed at Hacking Team.

It is interesting, though, analyze the “claims” that some “expert” did about the story. To make my points, instead of talking about someone in particular, I’d rather refer in general to the accusations made against HT, so:

  1. Hacking Team has been “unethical”. A company is just supposed to be legally compliant. Ethic is a horse of different colours: it’s a personal thing, is relative and – thank to the French Revolution – is not mixed with laws. As soon as Hacking Team didn’t break any law by selling its stuff, it can’t be blamed because “money doesn’t smell”.
  2. Hacking Team sold its technology to human-rights bashing countries. While I’m in the digital rights world since 1994, I wasn’t aware that there were so much human-rights (keybord) warriors… Anyway, as soon a state has a seat in UN, and the sell is compliant to international laws and treaties (such as the Wassenaar Agreement), doing business with it shouldn’t raise any concern (as international weapon dealers are well aware of.)
  3. Hacking Team has jeopardized investigations and covert activities all around the world. No, the investigation have been jeopardized by the choice made by governments of “going private” instead of developing in house its intelligence-gathering tools, and by the lack of a “Plan B” in case things – as just happened – screwed up. In particular, is rather curious that nobody checked the fact that the HT’slicense was associated to the customer identity in clear, instead of using a nickname or a cipher.
  4. There will soon be a “black” Hacking Team’s software clone that will be used against the “good guys”. This malware is far from being the “only kid in town” and the Internet is full of brilliant (rogue) programmers able to build a “HT-like” software. So this statement is just a nonsense.
  5. The are hints suggesting that ?Hacking Team’s malware has been exploited to plant fake evidence in the targeted computer. So what? Blackmailing is a standard tool-of-the-trade in the intelligence world and the way this is done is irrelevant. And to shut down the disturbing voice of a political opponent it’s easier to frame him with conventional means (drugs, sex) that are cheaper while very effective, then using a costly and complex to manage application.
  6. Hacking Teams’s software is untraceable and now can and will be used without control. No, HT malware is not invincible and while it is able to fly under the antivirus’ radars, it doesn’t mean that there are no defense. Guess how you can reduce its’ might? Use pure text emails, don’t click links and attachments, check your machines and data-traffic for odd behaviours… In other words, stop using ? wisthle&bell operating systems and fancy features and go back to basics. Ain’t no fancy, but is safer.
  7. Hacking Team helped intelligence agencies to gain access to everybody’s computer. Again, so what? Are intelligence agencies around the world supposed to play bridge, instead? As much as I dislike the fact, I cannot but pragmatically accept that the powers-that-be can do whatever they want, without actual accountability. They call it “democracy”.

Post Scriptum: Though I met David Vincenzetti about eighteen years ago at the Department of Computer Science in the Milan University and a couple of times in the following years, I never worked with or for him.

 

If You Really Dislike Google, Just Do A Better One

The usual, questionable and acritical article raises “awareness” about the “danger” represented by the way Google handles the results of users’ queries, this time the “victims” being the “consumers”. The source of this article is a study supported by Yelp.

While I’m not a statistician, I wonder how is possible to give general credit to a study based on a “random sample” (no method to build the randomness is disclosed) of less than 3.000 people compared to the billions of users that daily query the web through Google, furthermore without taking into account the huge ethnic and cultural differences of the countries whose users come from.

And I wonder why the journalist wrote it ? without asking an independent expert opinion. She just released what ? seems just a summary of the study’s summary, without ? actual knowledge of the topics involved. In other words, this article is somehow in between disinformation and misinformation. And, to be clear, I’m not questioning the integrity of the journalist (for instance she duly exploited the Yelp’s involvement in the study);what I criticize is that she didn’t actually deliver informative contents. No matter if this comes from a poor grasping of the mathematics methods, or by way of a lack of knowledge of the digital business world. Fact is the her readers aren’t given sound information, and what they got, instead, is the usual “Is-Google-evil?” article that, from time to time, appears all around the net.

Moving to a general issue, at the end of the day, things are pretty straightforward: Google neither is perfect nor necessarily “friendly”, but if you dislike Google, just build a better one, instead of using spin, FUD and the law.

Of course, If you ????.

Post Scriptum: I neither work for Google, nor have other kind of involvements with it.