eSurv

2021: Bankruptcy by court order

On March 17, 2021, it became known that the company eSurv, which was engaged in the distribution of espionage ON for Android devices and collaborated with the police, was declared bankrupt by a court decision. For years, the company distributed its programs directly through Google Play the company's official Android app store. Google

ESurv is an Italian company that began its journey as a developer of video surveillance systems, but at one point decided to discover another area of ​ ​ activity based on experience. The source writes that her leadership wanted to take the place of the Hacking Team, which had been distributing spy software for quite some time.

According to Vice, eSurv did not deny her connection with law enforcement agencies. On the contrary, she even posted on her website a message about her victory in the tender of the Italian police for the development of a certain "passive and active interception system."

As of March 2021, about 1000 people became victims of eSurv activity. Many of them were ordinary citizens who were not connected with the criminal world and did not commit any crimes, but they were still monitored.

Specialists eSurv masked spyware mobile software as harmless applications for receiving advertising and marketing offers from local Italian telecom operators and programs to improve the performance of devices (antivirus, optimizers, etc.). Secretly from users, the company pumped out gigabytes of personal data from their smartphones and tablets, without even daring to get access to microphones for the purpose of wiretapping.

How long eSurv was tracking Android users, and why Google did not identify and remove its dangerous applications from its store, remains unknown. Vice specialists shed light on its activities in early April 2019, saying that between 2017 and 2019. eSurv posted 25 malicious applications on Google Play. It is possible that she began to do this before. All its malware specialists in information security combined into one group called Exodus.

At the same time, it turned out that the police searched the office of the eSurv and seized everything computers on suspicion of illegally tapping telephone conversations. The Italian newspaper La Repubblica reported that the prosecutor's office also joined the case - she initiated an audit of four top managers of the company. Among them are the head of eSurv Giuseppe Fasano and Salvatore Ansani, another member of the company's management. According to information the TechDirt portal, at the end of January 2020, top managers of the company were arrested.

TechDirt writes that the espionage software eSurv the Exodus family was in high demand among Italian law enforcement agencies, and not only among the police. For example, the company was purchased by the prosecutor's office and the Italian Information and External Security Agency (L'Agenzia Informazioni e Sicurezza Esterna).

The fact of using surveillance software was accidentally discovered by a prosecutor from Naples. He stated that the files he found could be accessed by anyone from any country in password information the world if he had a login and - all the accumulated, obtained as a result of surveillance, was posted cloud Amazon in one of servers Oregon (), USA moreover in the form. unencrypted

The data array discovered by the prosecutor and accumulated by the Italian security forces contained thousands of photos, recordings of conversations, personal messages and emails, videos and other files collected from hacked devices. In total, the server had about 80 TB of data.

One of the victims of surveillance was a 49-year-old, at that time, a resident of the Italian city of Croton. The archive with her files contained her personal text messages that she sent to relatives and acquaintances, as well as 3800 recordings secretly made on the microphone of her smartphone. That is, she was watched almost constantly while she was engaged in her daily affairs.

The interim result of the investigation, the person involved in which became eSurv, was her bankruptcy, the decision of which was made on March 4, 2021 by the court of the Italian city of Catanzaro. The company is registered in this city. The verdict was delivered by Judge Pierpaolo Vincelli.

However, bankruptcy does not eSurv mean that the criminal investigation has been terminated. It, as an unnamed law enforcement source told Vice, is still ongoing, and it is possible that investigators will reveal new circumstances of illegal activities eSurv^[1].

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