Gamma International

A UK tech firm has denied supplying spyware technology to the former Egyptian government of Hosni Mubarak. Documents uncovered when the country's security service headquarters were ransacked during the Arab Spring uprising suggest that Egypt had purchased a package called FinFisher to spy on dissidents.

FinFisher, developed by UK firm Gamma International, is supplied exclusively to law enforcement and intelligence agencies as a surveillance tool. Trojans of this type – known as Remote Access Tools or RATs – are typically used to plant bugs on suspects' PCs to monitor emails and instant-messaging conversations, or intercept Skype calls, as the pitch for FinFisher explains:

The remote monitoring and infection solutions are used to access target systems, giving full access to stored information with the ability to take control of the target systems' functions to the point of capturing encrypted data and communications. In combination with enhanced remote infection methods, the government agency will have the capability to remotely infect target systems.

Protesters in Nasr (Egypt) took over the Headquarters of the Egyptian State Security. Inside the HQ, the protesters gained access to loads of confidential state documents. The recovered documents suggest the tool was licensed for a five-month trial at the back end of last year at a cost of €287,000.

Among them was a document that is highly relevant to computer security: an offer for a product called FinFisher sent to the Egypt State Security Investigation Department.

NOTE: The origin of this document is not confirmed. You can download the full document here

FinFisher seems to be an Intrusion and Spying software framework. It seems to include multiple components, including an infection proxy and various intrusion tools. Nobody knows if Egypt State Security purchased the tool or not. Nobody knows if they were using it to spy on their own citizens.

But is it possible to detect FinFisher? They don't know, as they don't have a sample at hand they could use to confirm this. If somebody gets researchers a known copy of FinFisher, would they knowingly add detection for it? They would. It would be a slippery slope to stop detecting government trojans. If the USA's government would ask researchers not to detect something and they would do it, then what? Should they avoid detecting hacking software used by governments?

Gamma International UK denied supplying the software to the Egyptian authorities. It added that it complied with UK export restrictions. The sales documents in question appear genuine, though it's hard to be absolutely sure especially since Gamma International has yet to respond to requests to discuss the matter. The supply of spy technology to friendly but repressive regimes is a grey area.

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