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Hacked Hacking Team team – like everyone in security – read The Register

If only they'd paid more attention

Hacking Team CEO David Vincenzetti and his staff were avid readers of The Register, frequently recommending our articles to one another.

A trawl through the company's email records, which were hacked and revealed to the world this week, reveals that Vincenzetti ran something of an in-house news service in which his researchers and C-level chums chortled about security holes and online mayhem that The Reg, and other outlets, reported each day.

Of special interest was news of reverses at rival surveillance-ware firms, such as the revelation root and remote unauthenticated zero day pwnage was possible in kit sold by rival spy firm NICE.

"Too bad for NICE. Not bad for us," Vincenzetti wrote.

The laughter's probably stopped seeing as Hacking Team was thoroughly hosed by actors unknown who stole at least 400Gb of source code and emails - from which these select news bites are found - and uploaded it to BitTorrent.

Vincenzetti also labelled "remarkable" the revelations of our own Alastair Sloan exclusive expose of the Omani Government's spying on Shell using the FinFisher kit sold by much-hated rival spy firm Gamma International.

Mind-melting news by Reg scribe Iain Thomson that the US spy apparatus is peering into American cell-network packets using nothing short of Cessna aircraft did one of the last Hacking Team news rounds before this week's epic pillaging – along with security journo John Leyden's tale of crypto guru Bruce Schneier warning: "We stand on the brink of global cyber war."

Your correspondent scored a little Hacking Team love, too, with tales like Factory reset memory wipe FAILS in 500 MEELLION Android mobes, Evil Wi-Fi kills iPhones, iPods in range – 'No iOS Zone' SSL bug revealed (the fix - RUN AWAY!), and the fear-inducing data drop that was the POODLE preview: NASTY SSL 3.0 vuln to be revealed soon all doing the rounds inside Hacking Team.

El Reg is only one of a host of security news outlets to have been regularly cited in the email streams which picked up the daily spraying of digital blood that is the security research businesses – although we seem to feature more than most. Hacking Team's perusal of such material shows the company surely knew the risks it faced.

Rather than laughing at rivals' misfortunes, perhaps the company should have been paying closer attention? ®

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