Hacking Team may not have had a backdoor, but it could kill client installs

In a rare press release issued Wednesday morning, Hacking Team, the embattled Italian surveillance software vendor, reiterated that it did not and does not have a "backdoor" into its clients’ installations of the Remote Control System, or RCS. But new analysis of its leaked source code seems to directly contradict this claim.

Hacking team said:

There have been reports that our software contained some sort of "backdoor" that permitted Hacking Team insight into the operations of our clients or the ability to disable their software. This is not true. No such backdoors were ever present, and clients have been permitted to examine the source code to reassure themselves of this fact.

According to new research by Joseph Greenwood, a UK-based researcher with 4Armed who has been examining the leaked RCS source code in detail, this is a distinction without a difference.