Vigilante Hacks Government-Linked Cyberespionage Group

He's joking mostly. He uploaded a webshell through the very poorly designed system that was in use. A webshell just runs whatever command it's given on a the machine its located and returns the results.

A nodejs based webshell is like 5 lines of code.

edit: imagine a URL like this: http://yourtarget.example.com/webshell?cmd=whoami

And that runs "whoami" on the target machine and returns the results.

I suspect light sarcasm on the part of the perpetrator.

Stylometric analysis is a thing.

> “Hacking back should be legalized so Kaspersky could of done this themselves,” the hacker wrote in their message on the ZooPark server.

That line right there sounds like very much the propaganda the U.S. government has been pushing lately to convince people to support "hacking back." I've only heard government members promote this.

I guess this could be an operation where they try to make "hacking back" into something "heroes" (vigilantes) do.

It's not just exploits tbh. Apple have really, really good tools for locking down and monitoring iPhones. The device enrolment thing they have is fantastic, and very streamlined. Meanwhile I have no idea what's going on with Android Enterprise/Samsung Knox/Whatever It's Called, and I don't think any sysadmins I know have a clue either.

Even without malware, Android needs to fix its permissions. What's the point in enforcing security policies on phones when a legitimate app, when given permission to, can read text messages on an employee's phone and send all the data to China? Businesses care about not having communications with customers leaked and Android is absolutely the wrong platform for that.

Unfortunately, I suspect vigilante behaviour and thinking is becoming more popular in society as a whole, both in cyber security and outside of it. See also the attacks on social media sites/attempts to get people fired/blacklisted, the increase in protests turning violent, and hacking attempts in general.

Feels like a decent percentage of the population have lost faith in the government and rule of law.

Which to be fair, wouldn't exactly be a shocking belief where cybersecurity is concerned. The police and authorities rarely do anything effective against hackers, virus creators and other internet law breakers in general, in part because it requires a lot of resources to investigate someone/some group who might very well be on the other side of the planet and outside the victim's legal system. In that sense, I'm not surprised it's getting more popular.

Shouldn't "hacking back" be extended to companies that collect user's data without obtaining their consent properly, without respecting privacy and local customs like Google, Cambridge Analytics, or Facebook do?

When leaders do not submit to the rule of law, neither will the citizenry.

It's not "more popular". You're just hearing more propaganda about it. Just because you hear a lie more often, doesn't make something true, either.