Gadgetory

a company that makes hacking software has just been hacked I'm Bridget Carey this is your cnet update an italian software company that helps governments hack into computers and spy on people has itself been hacked the company is called hacking team and hackers took over the company's twitter account on sunday and leaked out internal documents emails employee passwords and source code what you're looking at now is a commercial for this hacking team company it advertises its software as an untraceable way for governments to hack into any computer to spy on someone 400 gigabytes of documents from this company were dumped online but as of this report the files cannot be independently verified as being real reporters with our sister site ZDNet have been combing through the files and that includes a list of customers united states agencies are listed customers including the FBI Department of Defense and the Drug Enforcement Administration there's also a long list of other governments using the software including Egypt Italy Mexico Russia Saudi Arabia Spain Sudan Thailand and Turkey in 2012 reporters without borders labeled this company as an enemy of the internet for selling this encryption breaking software which reports of it being used to repress journalists and other activist groups the hacking team company has previously denied it does business with oppressive governments and those that may use the tools to abuse human rights this all calls into question whether a company can sell this type of software to any government after all hacking software can be considered a weapon in cyber warfare this hack is also a gift to anti surveillance groups who want this company to be shut down because now it's going to be hard for any government to trust this software maker and speaking of gifts let's transition to Amazon which is creating its own christmas in july for prime subscribers amazon is celebrating its 20th birthday next week with what it calls prime day on Wednesday July fifteenth the site will offer more deals than it did on Black Friday the catch is that only prime subscribers can get the deals for one hundred dollars a year prime brings several benefits including two day shipping access to a library videos music and ebooks but even if you don't pay for prime you could just sign up for the free month trial go shopping on the fifteenth and then cancel the membership aside from celebratory birthday sales amazon has launched a cloud storage app for android and iOS the Amazon Cloud Drive app is the company's answer to services like Dropbox where you pay a fee to store your files online Amazon's the unlimited photo and video storage plan costs twelve dollars a year and unlimited storage for all sorts of documents will cost you sixty dollars a year but here's a tip it's not that great compared to what other services offer that's it for this tech news update there's always more at cnet com from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey