"Hacking Team" is a badly-named security contractor that helps governments spy on activists and journalists. It got hacked, badly, and more than 400GB of its data is now public.
Widely shared online, the stolen data includes a list of the countries that have bought Hacking Team's main surveillance tool, Da Vinci, and emails suggesting intelligence agencies use it to spy on activists and journalists.
The list includes:
Azerbaijan,
Chile,
Egypt,
Kazakhstan,
Russia,
Saudi Arabia,
Spain, Sudan.… Confirmation of the breach came via the Twitter account of Hacking Team engineer Christian Pozzi.
"We are awake. The people responsible for this will be arrested. We are working with the police at the moment," he said in one message.
Soon after, this and other messages about the breach were removed as Mr Pozzi's Twitter account was deleted.
What better outcome for this company than tweeted authoritarian outrage, sputtering its way into the memory hole.
