Education: ESET VirusLab.
Highlights of your career: Discovery of one of the biggest surveillance campaign seen so far
What malware do you hate the most? Everyone of them.
Favorite activities: Learning from other experts. Sports (swimming).
Golden rule for cyberspace? Always be careful.
When did you get your first computer and what kind was it? When I was five, it was very old one.
Favorite computer game / activity: Reverse engineering!
Since being founded in 2003, the Italian spyware vendor Hacking Team gained notoriety for selling surveillance tools to governments and their agencies across the world. The capabilities of its flagship product, the Remote Control System (RCS), include extracting files from a targeted device, intercepting emails and instant messaging, as well as remotely activating a device’s webcam and microphone.
To help malware analysts and security researchers overcome FinFisher’s advanced anti-disassembly obfuscation and virtualization features, ESET researchers have framed some clever tricks into a whitepaper, “ESET’s guide to deobfuscating and devirtualizing FinFisher”.
As we reported in September, in campaigns we detected in two different countries, man-in-the-middle attacks had been used to spread FinFisher, with the “man” in both cases most likely operating at the ISP level.
FinFisher has extensive spying capabilities, such as live surveillance through webcams and microphones, keylogging, and exfiltration of files. What sets FinFisher apart from other surveillance tools, however, are the controversies around its deployments.
