14 DAY TRIAL // The leaked documents from Gamma Group, the company developing the FinFisher spy tool (also known as FinSpy) for governments and law enforcement agencies, reveal that the utility was used by the Bahrain government to run surveillance on Arab Spring protesters.
The files containing the information were stolen from Gamma Group’s systems by an unknown hacker who is now revealing them to the public in order to expose the practices of the company.
In a Reddit post, the hacker said that two years ago the spyware “was found being widely used by governments in the middle east, especially Bahrain, to hack and spy on the computers and phones of journalists and dissidents.”
The company denied having sold their software to the Bahrain government and said that a copy must have been stolen from their systems.
However, the hacker managed to find their way through the security of Gamma Group’s systems and exfiltrated 40GB of data, some of it revealing that the company did sell the software to individuals that used it to attack Bahraini activists.
According to the leaked files, the spyware was installed on 77 machines of different individuals, from human rights lawyers and activists, to opposition leaders and journalists.
Bahrain Watch says that some of the persons targeted for surveillance are currently in prison.
“Hassan Mushaima, one of the Bahrain 13 group of imprisoned opposition leaders, and the head of the now-banned ‘Haq Movement’, was infected on 14 November 2010 in an attack on his computer named HASANMUSHAIM. He is currently serving life in prison. An individual with the username Nader was also infected in the same operation.
“In an operation a week earlier on 8 November 2010, a computer named EBRAHIM-SONYPC was infected. We suspect that this computer belonged to Ebrahim Sharif, another prominent opposition leader who heads the liberal Waad party, based on the fact that he was using a Sony Vaio computer at the time. He is currently serving a 5 year prison sentence,” writes the newspaper.
After analyzing FinFisher system logs from February 2012, the publication learned that other protesters have also been the subject of surveillance activities conducted by the Bahrain government, with the help of Gamma Group. They also published the log sheet via Google Drive.
FinFisher is a complete spying toolkit that can be planted on computer and phone devices and offers its operators access to private information about the victim.
It is sold to government and law enforcement agencies for huge prices; the cost is almost €1.5 / $2 million for the software package, while practical penetration testing costs reach €27,000 / $36,000.
Getting the entire set of tools and services makes for a close to €3 / $4 million bill.