Revealed: The true extent of Hacking Team contacts across Europe.

3 min readJul 9, 2015

PART 3
IRAQI KURDISTAN VIA LUXEMBOURG

(Via Israel and Germany )

One of Hacking Team’s key partner, NICE Systems, is an Israeli company
that is closely linked to Israeli Intelligence Services and its 8200 Unit, responsible for Signal Intelligence (SIGINT ).

The recently leaked data revealed NICE Systems had sold equipment to another company, INTECH-Solutions, a German reseller to intelligence companies.

Project CONDOR and FALCON

The equipment purchased from Hacking Team and overseen by NICE Systems were for two distinct customers, and were coded as project CONDOR and FALCON.

Invoices all point to INTECH-Solutions in Germany but internal documents further revealed they transited or were destined to other organizations.

A client renewal list in particular, lists “K Iraqi” as the country for INTECH-CONDOR:

Caption from client list_renewal date.xslx

And an email from 2014 also describes the customer having ISIS forces 20km from their city:

“We met the customer for training in Milan a month and a half ago, they already had isis to 20km from their city in August and they are all prepared for any eventuality.
We are talking about National Security.”

Events at the time (October 2014 ) saw ISIS forces “probe” Kurdish defences around Erbil, on the south Kurdistan frontier. (link)

Proxies and relations

Other documents list further intermediaries, such as HT’s latest client overview list (Client Overview_list20150515.xslx ):

In particular, the country is listed as “Luxemburg” and this is the case for both projects Condor and Falcon.

Another intermediary, sith@lea-consult.de is for Simon Thewes, an independent consultant. Joined by phone, he could not divulge any information relating to current customers, for obvious confidentiality reasons, but insisted he was a puzzled by all the companies involved and had no idea why Luxembourg would be mentioned in the documents. He also seemed unaware of NICE Systems involvement.

Intech-solutions answered my call but refused to comment.

Project Condor started in 2010, and totalled €446,000 by 2015, for a Remote Control System (RCS ) and additional support and licences.

FALCON

Project FALCON started later, in 2012, also for a RCS.
It is also listed as “Luxemburg” and “State security”:

Another intermediary also appears on invoices, TKSL.

Its director is Simon Thewes, involved in the Condor project.

It is not clear if the final customer is Luxembourg’s state security, SREL,
but it would certainly be another blow for the service, after its activities were investigated in a scandal in 2013, which brought down Luxembourg’s premier, Jean-Claude Junker.

The invoices total €278,000 to date.

Download the documents related to this story