The founder of the notorious, now-defunct spyware development team Hacking Team was arrested on Saturday on suspicion of stabbing and attempting to murder a relative.According to local media reports, David Vincenzetti, who founded HackingTeam in 2003, was arrested by the police after his cousin called the police. According to Italian newspaper IlGiorno, Vincenzetti had psychological problems and his wife was visiting him and taking care of him at the time. He allegedly stabbed the woman and police found her unconscious.
Vincenzetti did not speak about the incident during his trial, but rambled on about work and his company, prompting the judge to order prosecutors to investigate his mental health. The judge also ordered the man to be held in jail as a precaution, the newspaper reported.
Telephone operators at the San Vittore prison in Milan, where Vincenzetti is said to be being held, said they could not confirm whether Vincenzetti was a detainee and would not allow outsiders to speak to any detainees.
Vincenzetti has not been in the public eye since 2020, when he announced on his LinkedIn account that HackingTeam was "dead." A year ago, Vincenzetti sold the company and renamed it MementoLabs.
HackingTeam was one of the first companies to develop and sell spyware to governments, initially in Italy and later around the world. At its peak, HackingTeam had about 40 government clients, including Spain, Hungary, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Colombia, Ecuador, South Korea and Malaysia.
After years of lurking under the radar, security researchers discovered that HackingTeam's tools were used to target journalists and dissidents by customers in countries such as Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, and Ethiopia. The company has defended itself, saying it only sells to governments where it can legally sell it and is not responsible for what its customers do with its tools.
In 2015, a mysterious vigilante hacker named "Phineas Fisher" invaded HackingTeam and leaked thousands of the company's internal emails and, more importantly, the source code of the spyware. The catastrophic vulnerability caused key developers to leave the company and forced the company to ask customers to temporarily stop using its products. Slowly, HackingTeam began losing customers, tried to rebrand, sold a stake to Saudi investors, and was eventually sold to new management.