Company Sends Bogus Copyright Takedown Over Hacking Team Docs

We've already written about the hack and leak of the Hacking Team and all its emails and files. There are likely to be tons of stories coming out from that hack over the next few days and weeks as people go through everything. However, it appears that someone is at least making a pretty ridiculous and half-hearted attempt to stuff that genie back in the bottle. Security consultant Mustafa Al-Bassam noted on Twitter that he received a copyright takedown notice for his mirror of the files from a different company, Lexsi.

I just got a DMCA complaint from one of Hacking Team's clients (@lexsi). pic.twitter.com/uoLTQySreI

— Mustafa Al-Bassam (@musalbas) July 6, 2015

If you can't read the letter, it clearly shows Lexsi making a copyright claim since it includes the "Copyright Holder's Name" in the list at the top. But in the body of the message, it makes a random claim about "sensitive and confidential information" rather than infringing information:

Hello,

We have just identified that the website musalbas.com/ displays sensitive and confidential information.

We would be grateful if you transmit the identify of the hosting provider in order to retrieve the sensitve documents.

Please confirm the reception of our request by responding to this email.

Thank you in advance for your help and feel free to contact us should you need more information.

At first Al-Bassam thinks that Lexsi must be a Hacking Team client, but then notes that there's no listing of Lexsi in the documents (which include customer rolls). It's possible that the client relationship runs the other way. Lexsi claims it does "cybercrime mitigation," so it's possible that Hacking Team (or others?) hired the company to try to bury the Hacking Team documents -- though that seems like an unenviable, if Sisyphean, task. Either way, whatever Lexsi was thinking here, it seems unlikely to have the desired impact.

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