Lawyer finds surveillance software baked into hard drive supplied by police

[RT] An Arkansas lawyer currently involved in a police whistleblower case was in for a rude surprise when he received an external hard drive via Federal Express from a law enforcement attorney: It was stuffed with three different kinds of surveillance malware.

Lawyer Matthew Campbell of North Little Rock first started thinking something was wrong when the attorney for the Fort Smith Police Department responded to his request for evidence by sending him a hard drive. Typically, Campbell had received evidence via email, the US Postal Service or a cloud-based storage system.

"Something didn't add up in the way they approached it, so I sent it to my software guy first," Campbell said to the Northwest Arkansas Democrat Gazette. "I thought 'I'm not plugging that into my computer,' so I sent it to [a software expert] to inspect."

After the security consultant took a look at the hardware, he found it was set up to intercept Campbell’s passwords, take over control of his computer and allow for the installation of additional malware. The presence of this software wasn’t an accident, according to an affidavit on the case filed last week.

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