Despite Hacking Team’s poor opsec, CEO came from early days of PGP

Many years before his corporate e-mails would be plastered all over the Internet following a major security breach of his company, a young David Vincenzetti often posted to various Usenet groups, generally espousing his own pro-crypto views.

"The saving of privacy will be a very significant issue (and also a business) in the near future," he wrote, responding to a December 1999 article about then-presidential candidate Steve Forbes' speech on privacy and removing export controls on crypto.

The post is merely one of many retroactive discoveries happening as security onlookers revisit Vincenzetti's Usenet writings from the '90s in the wake of Sunday's Hacking Team breach. The file obtained from that hack—400GB of information distributed via BitTorrent (and published here)—reportedly includes not only various employee e-mails but also source code, financial documents, and more. And as the Daily Dot wryly observed early this week, Vincenzetti's online past indicates that “a younger Vincenzetti might as well have been coding a program to beat out his older self.”