The US Justice Department announced on Tuesday that it has deactivated an “sophisticated” espionage system that has been used for two decades by Russia’s secret, the FSB – the heiress of the Soviet KGB – in 50 countries, including a NATO ally.
According to US authorities, the FSB had successfully injected the Snake of Ouroboros malicious program into computer systems around the world, targeting government networks, investigative systems and journalists.
In an operation that spanned years, the FBI managed to defeat Snake by feeding his own computer code into him and making him issue commands that caused the malicious software to rewrite itself, leading to castration, the Justice Department explained .
“Through a high-tech operation that turned this Russian malicious program against itself, US authorities have neutralized one of Russia’s most sophisticated cyber-espionage tools,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said in a statement.
Information security experts have known about malware for at least a decade, and Cisa, the US cyber defense agency, said the FSB began developing it in 2003.
According to Cisa, Snake is “the most sophisticated cyber-espionage tool in the FSB’s arsenal,” highly secretive, extremely difficult to detect in computer systems and network traffic.
In addition, it contained “surprisingly few errors given its complexity,” the agency noted.
These aspects allowed the FSB to work undetected for years in ever-expanding networks and access computers containing confidential documents.
In at least one case, Snake was fed into the systems of a NATO country — which has not been identified — allowing Russian secret services to access and filter confidential international relations documents and diplomatic communications, Cisa reported.
“The effectiveness of this type of cyber espionage insertion is entirely dependent on your discretion over the long term,” he added.
Source: DN
