Surveillance: Leaked files confirm use of spying software

According to leaked documents, someone from Pakistan leased three software based products of FinFisher for three years


News Desk August 23, 2014



Infected Microsoft Office documents — particularly PowerPoint slides – were used to spy on people by someone from Pakistan using software developed by surveillance software developer FinFisher, Digital Rights Foundation said on Friday based on files leaked recently. FinFisher customer support portals were hacked earlier in August and nearly 40Gb of data was leaked on to the internet through torrents.


According to the leaked documents, someone from Pakistan had leased three software based products of FinFisher for a period of three years starting in 2010. It is not clear who in Pakistan had leased the software.


Earlier in August, leaked files revealed that software manufactured by the German company had been used in Bahrain for spying on protesters. The software was used to track, among others, human rights lawyers.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 23rd, 2014.

COMMENTS (1)

Tahir Mateen | 9 years ago | Reply

As I tried to save this article, the file did not save in Mozilla. I copied it to LibreOffice and tried to save but my LibreOffice stopped functioning. I restarted my computer and repeated all the steps but again my computer froze. Next time, I restarted the computer and tried to save the article in a text editor but the Linux stopped functioning. I tried switching off wireless but it seemed that once the article was loaded not much on my computer was in my control. Restart seems tohelp. Such a vicious force behind it!

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