The Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky has announced that it has uncovered a hacking campaign targeting it, with the FSB accusing the US NSA of being behind this cyberattack, amid extreme tensions between Moscow and Washington.
“Kaspersky Lab researchers have discovered previously unknown malware that attacks iOS devices” (from the US brand Apple), the company said in a statement on Thursday, according to which “dozens of employees” have been attacked.
During this campaign called “Operation Triangulation” by Kaspersky, one of the world’s leading antivirus companies, the main process was as follows: “malware infiltrates victims’ devices (…) via an iMessage hidden, then wakes up and takes full control of the device and user data.”
All this without the assistance, at any time, of the owner of the device, a method that is reminiscent of the attacks called “zero click” by experts. “After that, the (corrupted) iMessage was automatically removed,” the statement said.
“The attackers’ goal is to spy,” Kaspersky denounced, according to which “installed software discreetly transmitted information from the victim’s device to remote servers.”
The NSA accused
The company claimed to have found traces of infection dating back to 2019 and that “the attack has continued” to this day, without saying who might be behind this hacking campaign.
The Russian security services (FSB) have accused, for their part, the US National Security Agency (NSA) of “close cooperation” with Apple, in a clear allusion to who would be responsible according to them. According to the FSB, “several thousand” Apple devices have been “infected”, which ensures that the number of people working in Russian embassies abroad have been “revealed” during this hacking campaign.
In a separate statement, Kaspersky’s boss and founder, Eugène Kaspersky, told him that the group “is convinced that (he) was not the primary target of this cyberattack” which targeted “middle and senior managers” of his business.
Specializing in cybersecurity, Kaspersky, which publishes antivirus software of the same name, joined the blacklist of the US telecommunications police in March 2022, just after the start of the Russian offensive in Ukraine, accusing Washington of representing a ” threat to national security”.
Founded in 1997 and regularly accused in recent years of proximity to the Russian intelligence services -from which it defends itself-, the company claims to have 400 million customer users in more than 200 countries around the world.
Source: BFM TV
