DEA, US Army bought $1.2M worth of hacking tools in recent years

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the United States Army have almost certainly been buying questionable remote access hacking tools for years from an Italian company called Hacking Team, via an obscure American reseller called Cicom USA.

Hacking Team openly advertises what it calls its "Remote Control System," (RCS) a piece of malware remotely installed on a target’s computer or smartphone. As the company touts: "Evidence collection on monitored devices is stealth and transmission of collected data from the device to the RCS server is encrypted and untraceable."

The security research group, Citizen Lab, has shown that Hacking Team’s smartphone malware has been spotted in the wild in many countries around the world, including Mexico, Morocco, Malaysia, Hungary, and more.