[ISN] Trojan horse couple indicted

[InfoSec News]

http://www.globes.co.il/serveen/globes/DocView.asp?did=1000067928&fid=1725

Yitzhak Danon 
Globes 
5 Mar 06

The Office of the State Attorney today filed charges with the Tel Aviv
District Court against the couple Ruth and Michael Haephrati. The
office has also asked that the couple be remanded until the end of
proceedings.

The Haephrati couple are charged with numerous offences related to
industrial espionage. Ruth Haephrati is to be charged with aggravated
fraud, inserting material and viruses into a computer (the Trojan
horse), unlawful wire tapping, invasion of privacy and unlicensed
management of a database. Michael Haephrati is to be charged with
aiding and abetting his wife in the committing of the offences listed
above.

According the indictment, Michael Haephrati conceived and developed
the Trojan horse software back in 2000 and subsequently attempted to
offer it lawfully to various security bodies. In mid-2004, he used
Ruth Haephrati, who handled the marketing activities, to contact the
private investigators involved in the affair, with a view to using the
software for criminal purposes. The investigators in question used the
software to access information regarding competitors or other private
entities, on behalf of their corporate or private clients.

The State Attorney's office stressed that the investigation into the
companies and individuals who commissioned the industrial espionage
was ongoing. It also listed the types of data that had been accessed
by the Trojan horse software used to hack into victims’ computers.  
These include documents created using word processing software,
electronic spread sheets, slide presentations, scanned documents and
others. The material accessed by the hackers contained expensive and
sensitive intellectual property.

The Trojan horse also provided real-time sensitive images of material
being viewed on hacked computers as well as of recordings of voice
communications conducted between infected machines.

Also accessed were email correspondence, passwords typed on the
keyboards of hacked computers, a list of all texts typed on them, as
well as lists of archived files and websites visited.