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Hacking Team: We're the good guys, but SO misunderstood. Like Batman

And we were brought down by a government conspiracy

The boss of Italian spy firm Hacking Team has spoken out for the first time about the recent massive hack of the company databases. This has exposed severe software security holes and gifted terrorists with zero-day exploits, among other things.

David Vincenzetti, in an interview with La Stampa newspaper, claimed his firm would recover from the attack and alleged that an unnamed government or organisation with "considerable funds" had infiltrated its data servers and leaked the information.

On Friday, a large cache of Hacking Team emails was published by WikiLeaks, after 400GB of the source code of highly sensitive files was spaffed online a week ago.

While the missives appeared to show the lengths the Hacking Team would go to in order to sell its surveillance tools to repressive regimes such as Libya, Sudan and Saudi Arabia, Vincenzetti attempted a face-saving PR exercise with the Italian newspaper this weekend.

He was quoted as saying:

The geopolitical [landscape] changes rapidly, and sometimes situations evolve.

But we do not trade in weapons, we do not sell guns that can be used for years.

We're the good guys.

However, commentators may strongly disagree with that claim in light of the emails that are now available online for anyone to view - not to mention further developments such as this. ®

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