The largest European hacker club, Chaos Computer Club
(CCC), has reverse engineered and analysed a lawful interception
malware program used by German police forces. It has been found in the wild and submitted to the CCC anonymously. The malware can not only siphon away intimate data but also offers a remote control or backdoor functionality for uploading and executing arbitrary other programs. Significant design and implementation flaws make all of the functionality available to anyone on the internet.
Even before the German constitutional court (Bundesverfassungsgericht
) on 27 February 2008 forbade the use of malware to manipulate German citizen’s PCs, the German government introduced a less conspicuous newspeak variant of the term spy software: Quellen-TKÜ
(the term means source wiretapping
or lawful interception at the source). This Quellen-TKÜ can by definition only be used for wiretapping internet telephony. The court also said that this has to be enforced through technical and legal means.
The CCC now published the extracted binary files [0] of the government malware that was used for Quellen-TKÜ
, together with a report about the functionality found and our conclusions about these findings. During this analysis, the CCC wrote its own remote control software for the trojan — via redwolf.newsvine.com
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