Stage win: FinFisher is bankrupt
ccc.de
ccc.de
https://mobile.twitter.com/Pingu/status/1469314222349852675
Quote from the OP article:
> the public prosecutor's office wanted to secure the assets potentially obtained from an unlawful act by means of an asset freeze in order to be able to confiscate them if necessary. The group of companies escaped seizure through insolvency
So you know what's going on.
This is a strange arrangement that I guess most countries follow. Companies are legal entities, that can be sued and so on. But a company cannot go to jail (board members or stock owners don't typically go to jail either). These legal entities can also seize to exist (like in this example), and then there is nobody left to be held accountable... It seems like most countries treat companies better than humans.
Completely agree, but in small/medium size companies (no public stock etc), these are often the same people. In many cases it's completely obvious who (which humans) that have done something wrong, but since we still accept that the legal entity under which they operated no longer exists; you're stuck.
A problem where I live (Norway) has been that people register companies to build apartment buildings, then immediately dissolve the company once the apartments are sold. The people who buy those flats better pray that there is nothing wrong with them, as there is basically nowhere to turn if there is.
I agree, but this should be standard procedure. Hiding behind these peculiar "legal entities" that cannot possibly be held accountable anyway, makes no sense.
> This is one of the reasons I've never bought a new house
Same here, although the house I did buy was 160 years old; which also comes with its own set of problems :-)
Hehe, been there done that. In fact, doing that, right now I'm fixing a window frame that had 'a small spot of rot', by the time it was done half the frame had been removed, incredible how bad wood can be under nicely looking paint. Insect paradise underneath there.
is similar to "a small spot of rust" I guess, there is no such thing :-)
Fascinating to see how these old tree constructions are made. I still find it hard to comprehend that a few bricks and some timber logs are all that separates me from living directly on the dirt like a cave man..
Sound like fun, and you shouldn't let age stop you from doing that. Instead you should adjust your dream to building a smaller post-and-beam house. It's not back breaking work if it's a small house; our inner cave men wants to work with timber for some reason.
I imagine the insurance premiums are quite high, to guard against such 'fly by night' operations.
This is also the case if you buy from a human.
This used to be the case here in Norway until 2021 as well, but now it's illegal to slap the old "sold-as-it-is" clause at the end of the contract.
You can still sell horrible stuff of course, but you have to say that it's horrible, in the listing :-)
A company can cease to exist on a whim, yet be reborn the next minute under a different name, with the same "genes", the same "information", because the actual living, breathing people behind it, just move on.
Exactly, you cannot just change name and buy a mustache like these companies basically can.
With companies it just ends there and then
Again, all of this came to light because of the hard and persistent work of a whole bunch of NGOs (GFF, netzpolitik, CCC and so on).
[1] https://netzpolitik.org/2022/nach-pfaendung-staatstrojaner-h...
IIRC the new company name, Vilic(i)us, describes the position of a "slave overseer" of Roman times. Unfortunately, I cannot find the wikipedia entry for it anymore (possible clean-up job of the new company?).
Edit:
Found it... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vilicus
People don't die when they go bankrupt.
You can add Ursula v.d.L. to that list.
I lost faith in all EU governments to do anything for the people.
okay, there are always exceptions to that rule, like e.g. Emperor Marcus Aurelius
Who could have expected that? /s It's like sheep electing flock leaders among a pack of wolves. When will we stop doing that?
Just the tip of the iceberg
And what made her unpopular initially: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_von_der_Leyen#Blocking_...
> [...] creating the necessary infrastructure for extensive censorship of websites deemed illegal by the BKA.
For full context.
Seriously?
Oh look, $method didn't stop $crimes where it is not relevant. Not surprising.
> The real criminals are not the weed dealers next door and not the dumb neo-fascists, they gather everyday in the parlaments with their shady double income, their wrongdoings and promises broken every day.
Weed dealers given the current legislation are commiting a crime. One of the biggest gifts to the lack of prosecution of higher politicians are the infighting between smaller "liberal" parties. And their general naivity
Are the people that are opposed to this happy when adversaries have hacked Germany?
You're free to protest at the nearest Extinction Even protest and pretend the "green's" anti-nuclear push has nothing to do with the latest events
btw "criminals like him (O.S.)"? sounds like either an AfD apologist or Linke supporter.
But on a more serious note, the battle for transparency and accountability (and ultimately democratic resilience) relies a lot on the hard work by many, many NGOs (many of those listed towards the end of the article, such as the wonderful Citizen Lab from U of Toronto).
I find it scary that such important monitorial tasks are left to underfunded volunteers which may go away at any second. Well, the same applies to journalists to a certain degree ... In both cases, we need to care more about sustainable funding of these institutions.
That said, good riddance. We desperately need accountability for malware coming from state actors.
> German authorities were of course also customers of the company
Though I don't think that's what the title was implying, I think it means German "nationality" rather than German "state-owned".
[1] https://netzpolitik.org/2013/secret-government-document-reve...
2) Because a large portion of people who are not in 1) support it, because they believe it is used to spy on the bad guys™ and never consider that these tools have already been abused in the past and will be abused in the future.
As to why the German public tolerate it: because there wasn't sufficient pushback and the government doesn't care about a few protests as most people will eventually forget about it and move on.
As with every dystopic "anti-terror" measurement, this is correct.
The free market isn't an ideology much like money isn't an ideology. Putting the free market in charge of certain aspects of society however is very much an ideological decision, though. Ideology doesn't stop being ideology just because you agree with it (although there are certainly plenty of political candidates throughout history who claim to not adhere to any ideologies). For example anarchists are somewhat open to market economies while state communists usually advocate for central planning and libertarians are strongly in favor of free market maximalism, believing that for a free market to work at its best it needs to be free of all regulations (tho usually still maintaing some rule of law to prevent a real world equivalent of EVE Online's corporate warfare).
I'm not saying privatization is good or bad, I'm just saying that the underlying ideology of the past decades in Germany has been that we should privatize as much as possible and where privatization is not possible we should at least reproduce a free market system as closely as possible (e.g. we have multiple competing public healthcare providers despite having strict regulations that mean they all provide very similar levels of care).
> Many states do this.
We do have people in government agencies "doing cyber". We just don't have a government owned software development department developing malware for government agencies to use, just like we don't have a government owned weapons manufacturing department developing weapons for the police and military.
We do have the government owning shares (even majority shares) in private (or rather publicly traded) companies though. But often these are in privatized branches of the government (e.g. Deutsche Bahn) or companies that are naturally monopolistic. Buying out a private software development company would go against the spirit of the free market as it would eliminate competition.
This kind of stuff is always justified with "terrorism, pedophilia and organized crime", but once its in place it's usually overwhelmingly applied to much pettier crimes.
For example Internet censorship (I believe in the form of IP bans but I'm not sure how they're meant to be implemented exactly) was originally justified with the necessity of blocking CSAM in jurisdictions that are out of reach of Germany and the EU but recently there were moves to ban the pornsite XHamster because it provided an insufficient age check to visitors (although with similar sites it's usually nothing more than a popup to the effect of "Are you old enough to view porn? Y/N"), which while still boiling down to "think of the children" isn't exactly the kind of thing von der Leyen originally described when shooting down criticism of the proposed law.
Guns aren't a great comparison because the use can (and usually is) wholly defensive or acts as a deterrent -- i.e if you are known to be armed then you'd be left alone.
Malware on the other hand is almost exclusively offensive and governments around the world almost exclusively use it for nefarious reasons (i.e NSO Group's clientele and published usages).
So maybe until now we didn't see a country with cyber in their strategy being invaded by another?
Just to drive the point: at the same time that they first requested the software (2014) the country was the biggest arms dealer for the Syrian civil war[0]. A large part of the arms they received after what happened in Crimea ended up making its way to countries like Syria[1] and it's likely a driving reason behind why the country was so ill-equipped with the current conflict. There is little doubt that the physical arms will eventually be sold off after this conflict is over, and with malware that can be copied quite easily it's likely it will be sold the moment it's acquired to any bidder that puts their hand up.
[0] https://qz.com/211603/how-ukrainian-arms-dealing-connects-to...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ukraine-crisis-arms-insig...
As ranked by countries and institutions in countries that rank themselves lower no doubt.
Oh sure, I agree. But that's bad governments not bad lines of code.
Look I see that there is more evil than good done with this stuff, but it's not the stuffs fault.
Nor are there usually any efficient checks&balances in place to make sure these tools are actually only used for their originally declared purpose.
That's why the mass-surveillance creep, since the Patriot Act, has been very real and for the most part completely unchecked, FISA court just rubber-stamping anything that comes their way.
In that context I'd rather see resources put towards fixing vulnerabilities, instead of leaving them open so they can be exploited by intelligence and police agencies. This approach would also prevent much more "evil" than hoping how the "good Big Brother" will not abuse his power and instead solely use the same vulnerabilities to stop the "evil" guys.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_terrorism#United...
I'm astonished that there are so many people here that are willing to defend government use of malware.
Malware is software deliberately designed to cause devices to malfunction. Since when is it legitimate for any government to deliberately break the property of a private citizen who hasn't been convicted of any offence, without at least a court order?
It's probably also worth mentioning that these Staatstrojaner haven't really demonstrated effectiveness. It's an extremely common refrain on the Netzpolitik scene here that we would all be much, much better served if the government were compelled to responsibly disclose the bugs used in these tools to the companies producing the software, instead of trying to keep them quiet in order to weaponize them. But I suspect this argument is basically preaching to the choir at HN. For German speakers, I would highly recommend following both Netzpolitik and Lage der Nation; the former is self-explanatory but the latter also frequently talks about digital policy in Germany.
Edit: a clarifying point here, as far as I understand, FinFisher is *not* a state-owned company (that would be big news!), but rather a normal GmbH (like an LLC) that develops and sells Staatstrojaner. As such I think the line in the title ("German State Malware Company") strikes me as inaccurate in both English and a hypothetical German->English translation.
[1] https://netzpolitik.org/2021/koalitionsvertrag-das-plant-die...
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Side note, I know metacommentary isn't typically considered entirely kosher on HN, but some threads I'm seeing pretty high up in the discussion here are really not meeting the quality standards I would expect from HN. Calling the current German chancellor Scholz a "criminal" with "buddies", and a follow-up thread that can be summed up as "I think the EU is so corrupt that it only looks after its own politicians" -- all of this with absolutely no evidence -- is so frustratingly hyperbolic and reductionist that it has me (in all seriousness) wondering what level of exposure HN has to state-level disinformation actors.