14 DAY TRIAL // An unnamed woman from the United States claims to have received an email designed to trick her into installing a piece of software called the Da Vinci Remote Control System (RCS), a spy tool developed by Italian firm Hacking Team and sold to governments from all around the world.
According to Wired, the email received by the woman purported to come from a Harvard University professor and it urged the recipient to click on a link to access a new essay about the Gülen movement, a secretive organization led by a Turkish man, Fethullah Gülen, who currently lives in exile in Pennsylvania, US.
The woman didn’t open the email because it came from a “hardward.edu” email address, instead of “harvard.edu.”
She forwarded the email in question to digital forensics firm Arsenal Consulting. The company determined that the downloader served on the site to which the woman was lured to was part of the RCS spy tool.
They’ve also found that the malware was launched from a server in Turkey.
The woman believes she has been targeted because she’s an outspoken critic of Turkish charter schools in the US. These schools are reportedly run by the Gülen movement, which is said to have infiltrated even the Turkish government.
Representatives of the Turkish Embassy in Washington, DC, have refused to comment on the allegations.
A spokesman for the company that develops the spy tool has told Wired that they sell the software to several dozen countries, but he failed to say if Turkey was one of them.
He has noted that Hacking Team investigates cases where clients are accused of using their product for illegal purposes. If the customer is found violating terms of service, the company can make the software inoperable.
“We know how powerful is the tool that we’ve developed, so we’re doing our best to make sure it doesn’t get abused,” he said.”[B]ut there is a limit to how we can control what someone does with the software,” Hacking Team spokesman Eric Rabe said.