According to hacked data, the Italian company may be in violation of European Union sanctions.
Rostec CEO Sergei Chemezov. Kvant, a Russian state-owned military technology company, appears to have purchased nearly $500,000 in surveillance technology from Italian firm Hacking Team, according to leaked data.
Vasily Maximov / Getty Images
A controversial Italian technology firm, Hacking Team, which sells services to help its clients spy on the internet communications of targeted people and organizations may have violated European Union sanctions by contracting with a Russian intelligence firm linked to a close ally of Vladimir Putin. That's according to information found in a massive data dump attackers claim came from Hacking Team's servers.
Hacking Team is a Milan-based surveillance technology company that sells "offensive" technology designed to give clients, mostly governments and law enforcement agencies, the ability to spy on internet users. Over the weekend, attackers published a 400 gigabyte torrent file that included Hacking Team emails, documents, and source code. According to a spreadsheet found in the release, since 2011 the company has sold $451,017 worth of technology to Kvant, a Russian state-owned military radar producer based in the city of Veliky Novgorod. The spreadsheet also includes a long list of state clients that counts repressive states like Egypt, Azerbaijan, Sudan, and Uzbekistan among apparent customers.
The breach indicates that Hacking Team may have violated an EU ban on selling "dual-use" technology with military purposes to Russian companies. Kvant last paid for Hacking Team's services last Nov. 30, according to the data — two months after the ban was established last fall when Russia fomented a war in eastern Ukraine.
"Intrusion" technology like Hacking Team's is defined as "dual-use" under a 2013 expansion of the Wassenaar Agreement, an international treaty that seeks to control their export to certain states. The treaty, whose 41 signatories include the U.S., United Kingdom, France, and Germany as well as Italy, creates a licensing regime that requires companies to seek approval before selling the technology to states with poor human rights records.
Selling "dual-use" technology to Russian military clients is banned outright under the separate EU Ukraine-related sanctions, though at least one company has appeared to flaunt the regulation in practice. A BuzzFeed News investigation revealed in May that technology giant Cisco attempted to sell to Russian state enterprises, including the security services, after the ban passed.
Kvant is part of Rostec, a multibillion-dollar hi-tech conglomerate of over 600 companies with military, industrial, and civilian concerns that employs 900,000 people — just over 1.2 percent of the Russian workforce. Its assets include the company that makes Kalashnikov automatic rifles, Russia's largest carmaker, and Rosoboronexport, the state arms exporter. The hack data lists Kvant as a client, but as "not officially supported".
Rostec's CEO, Sergei Chemezov, is a close associate of Putin who worked in East Germany when Putin was a KGB officer in Dresden in the late 1980s. The U.S. and EU imposed an asset freeze and a travel ban on Chemezov as part of the sanctions for Russia's military involvement in Ukraine last year. Rostec is also barred from engaging in debt transactions with a maturity longer than 30 days under the U.S. sanctions.
Hacking Team's "offensive technology" enables clients to surveil the internet communications of targeted people by, among other things, cracking encrypted files and emails, listening to Skype calls, and remotely activating microphones and cameras.
Previously, Hacking Team has denied selling its technology to repressive regimes and insisted that it adheres voluntarily to U.S., EU, and NATO blacklists.
Hacking Team has not returned BuzzFeed News' requests for comment.
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