German police will use their own "federal trojan"

The Federal Ministry of the Interior of Germany approved the use of a spyware Trojan developed by the Federal Criminal Police Office (the so-called “federal trojan”) in investigations. According to the publication of Deutsche Welle with reference to a representative of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the country, legal expertise and technical checks have been completed. Permission to use the program was given on Monday, February 22, according to helpnetsecurity.com .

The police, in order to get a court order to use a spyware trojan, will have to prove that the life and health of people, the interests of the state or state security are at risk.

Malicious software has been developed and is available from the fall of 2015. It is assumed that it will be used only for the so-called "telecommunication surveillance", i.e. read emails, messages, listen to phone calls made by the suspect using a computer or smartphone. However, access to files, theft of passwords or audio, video surveillance using the "federal Trojan" will not be carried out. But it is possible that this software is capable of this.
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And this is what worries experts from the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) - the largest hacker association in Europe. Frank Rieger, a spokesman for the CCC, explained that there are not so many technical differences between a trojan that can perform “telecommunication surveillance” and a trojan that can conduct audio and video surveillance.

Back in 2011, CCC acquired the Trojan submitted by the government and discovered that it had the opportunity to install a backdoor, update, take screenshots and activate the computer's camera and microphone, and not just listen to the conversations, as stated.

Some ministers in Germany admitted that they used it in investigations, but only to carry out telecommunications surveillance of suspects. They claimed that the CCS analyzed a test version of a Trojan created by the German company DigiTask, which was rejected because it can easily take screenshots. The last option, according to the ministers, can only perform telecommunications surveillance.

Probably, the Federal Criminal Police Office is using the software development of the German-British company Elamann / Gamma - an adaptation of the infamous FinFisher (on September 15, 2015, the Wikileaks website released the program files to the public so that victims could be protected from being tracked).