The Battle for Your Computer

CHAPTER 11In the Right Hands—The Israeli Companies That Stretched the Boundaries of Possibility

One day, the offices of Hacking Team, an Italian company, received an intriguing phone call. On the line was a senior official in the Milan police, who wanted to gain access to the company's technological tools in order to record the Skype conversations of a police suspect.

Hacking Team was founded in 2003 as a cyberdefense company.¹ One of the services it offered was penetration testing: running simulated cyberattacks to expose organizations' security flaws. Hacking Team decided to take this service a few steps forward, and its teams developed a tool that would prove exceptionally effective for offensive purposes. After the phone call from the Milanese gendarmerie, Hacking Team went from being just another cyberfirm to one of the first companies in the field of offensive cyber, laying the foundations for an entire industry.

Another major player is Gamma Group, an Anglo‐German company. Like Hacking Team, Gamma Group also offered the market malware that could be installed on the computers of espionage targets in order to extract documents, keyboard strokes, passwords, records, and more from them. And like Hacking Team, Gamma Group did not start off as an offensive cyberfirm, but when it understood the commercial potential of selling offensive cybertechnology for state espionage purposes, it decided to pivot.

Gamma Group had gotten its hands on a goose that laid golden eggs: its subsidiary, ...