Stage win: FinFisher is bankrupt

It appears like they&#x27;re just going through a &quot;rebranding&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;Pingu&#x2F;status&#x2F;1469314222349852675" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;mobile.twitter.com&#x2F;Pingu&#x2F;status&#x2F;1469314222349852675</a><p>Quote from the OP article:<p>&gt; <i>the public prosecutor&#x27;s office wanted to secure the assets potentially obtained from an unlawful act by means of an asset freeze in order to be able to confiscate them if necessary. The group of companies escaped seizure through insolvency</i><p>So you know what&#x27;s going on.

Probably a simple &quot;flip&quot;. Companies in Germany do that often when they want to move overseas. The reason is that the Finanzamt (IRS) will tax any assets you move abroad. That can be a large problem for companies that e.g. get US funding. I know of a case where a financially successful German startup got funded by YC and needed to reincorporate in the US. If they had done it via the official route the Finanzamt would have used the YC valuation as a basis for calculating the taxes and the company would&#x27;ve needed to pay a seven-figure amount. They circumvented this by bankrupting the company and buying out the assets instead, which was then tax-free. I strongly suspect this is a similar move by FinFisher.

They will continue under a new name and description. The success to this day is not remarkable. That software has not stopped criminals like Olaf Scholz and his buddies, nor has it protect a mayor of a city that was killed in his own house. So, its useless and unethical to think to automate prosecution. Too many false-positives and a bad success rate is not and can not be the goal to break basic rights. The real criminals are not the weed dealers next door and not the dumb neo-fascists, they gather everyday in the parlaments with their shady double income, their wrongdoings and promises broken every day. For what that software has brough revenue, the victims of the flood this summer, would enjoy golden handrails and faucets in their newly built homes.

I guess that&#x27;s a justified case for Schadenfreude ...<p>But on a more serious note, the battle for transparency and accountability (and ultimately democratic resilience) relies a lot on the hard work by many, many NGOs (many of those listed towards the end of the article, such as the wonderful Citizen Lab from U of Toronto).<p>I find it scary that such important monitorial tasks are left to underfunded volunteers which may go away at any second. Well, the same applies to journalists to a certain degree ... In both cases, we need to care more about sustainable funding of these institutions.

That the CCC thanks Microsoft ... hell is freezing in multiple places ;)

I didn&#x27;t know about this company before, but a cursory search suggests they were only based in Germany, not used by the German government. Title is misleading, especially as it is not the original title of the article, and Germany has in fact prosecuted them.<p>That said, good riddance. We desperately need accountability for malware coming from state actors.

why do we even tolerate malware companies

I will be interested to see how this interacts with the Ampel Koalition&#x27;s desire to add more restrictions on state-sponsored hacking (search term, &quot;Staatstrojaner&quot; [1]). The current government coalition contract includes &quot;increasing controls&quot; and &quot;higher thresholds&quot; for their use (my translation), which would signal a shift in German federal policy _at least slightly_ away from state-sponsored hacking, which was very favored by the previous government.<p>It&#x27;s probably also worth mentioning that these Staatstrojaner haven&#x27;t really demonstrated effectiveness. It&#x27;s an extremely common refrain on the Netzpolitik scene here that we would all be much, much better served if the government were compelled to responsibly disclose the bugs used in these tools to the companies producing the software, instead of trying to keep them quiet in order to weaponize them. But I suspect this argument is basically preaching to the choir at HN. For German speakers, I would highly recommend following both Netzpolitik and Lage der Nation; the former is self-explanatory but the latter also frequently talks about digital policy in Germany.<p>Edit: a clarifying point here, as far as I understand, FinFisher is *not* a state-owned company (that would be big news!), but rather a normal GmbH (like an LLC) that develops and sells Staatstrojaner. As such I think the line in the title (&quot;German State Malware Company&quot;) strikes me as inaccurate in both English and a hypothetical German-&gt;English translation.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;netzpolitik.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;koalitionsvertrag-das-plant-die-ampel-in-der-netzpolitik&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;netzpolitik.org&#x2F;2021&#x2F;koalitionsvertrag-das-plant-die...</a><p>----<p>Side note, I know metacommentary isn&#x27;t typically considered entirely kosher on HN, but some threads I&#x27;m seeing pretty high up in the discussion here are really not meeting the quality standards I would expect from HN. Calling the current German chancellor Scholz a &quot;criminal&quot; with &quot;buddies&quot;, and a follow-up thread that can be summed up as &quot;I think the EU is so corrupt that it only looks after its own politicians&quot; -- all of this with absolutely no evidence -- is so frustratingly hyperbolic and reductionist that it has me (in all seriousness) wondering what level of exposure HN has to state-level disinformation actors.

Good! Phineas Fisher will be pleased ;)