Gamma International Found Trading Spying Kit to Activists in Bahrain

It's yet again that Gamma International sold spyware toolkit to one country in Middle East, since security investigators have unraveled spying software that was dispatched to hacktivists inside Bahrain as having connection with the company's products. Techweekeurope.co.uk published this on July 26, 2012.

Reportedly, e-mails were sent to pro-democracy advocates in Bahrain with malware implanted during April-May 2012. These electronic mails were subsequently dispatched to the news agency 'Bloomberg' whose officials passed the malware files to the Citizen Lab of the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University-of-Toronto for examination. Researchers there perceived that the attached files happened to be variants of the FinSpy Trojan a computer code that Gamma supplied.

As per revelations by WikiLeaks, FinSpy is described as a RAT (Remote Access Tool) of Finfisher that facilitates tapping of encrypted messages. Specifically, Citizen Lab revealed that this RAT helped to track Skype call communications that had been encrypted.

The Lab analysts also revealed that the malicious program, which searched for anti-virus programs, possibly evaded a few of them.

They stated that the RAT tried contaminating the computers of pro-democracy activists of Bahrain through tactics of social engineering.

Meanwhile, according to one Munk investigator, the school received alert messages during early May 2012 about Bahraini activists getting aimed at with seemingly sinister electronic mails. Those e-mails allegedly related to the currently occurring chaos inside Bahrain, while prompted receivers to view several dubious attachments embedded serially, he explained. ZDNet published this dated July 25, 2012.

The activists-targeted messages characteristically contained malware-laced .rar zipped archive that had executables camouflaging image files. If run, those files loaded one Trojan having multiple features, and which employed several techniques for bypassing identification.

Evidently, the Finfisher happens to be an increasingly obtainable attack tool for buying and selling across the worldwide marketplace of cyber-weapons.

And while discovered that repressive nation-states obtain spying tools for targeting activists of countries in the West, it seems more-and-more that there'll be restrictions on countries towards exporting e-mechanisms for monitoring or surveillance. The UK government getting threats from London-situated 'Privacy International' towards enforcing stringent regulations on its international surveillance trade is a case in point.

Related article: Game, Television & Celebrities Websites Infect Computer with Malware

» SPAMfighter News - 8/2/2012