Western spies targeted phones of Russian officials – FSB (VIDEO)
Western intelligence agencies hacked the phones of Russian officials and other people with access to sensitive information, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has said.
Devices belonging to Russian diplomats, politicians, high-ranking officers and journalists were allegedly compromised, allowing foreign spies to record everything around them and collect vast amounts of data, the agency said in a statement on Tuesday.
The FSB said that its operatives uncovered “one of the largest operations involving the installation of malicious software on mobile devices.” The scheme had attempted to gather data through covert access to content and messaging, wiretapping of phone conversations, acoustic and video surveillance of the gadget’s surroundings, and through the collection of geolocation and contact data, it added.
“It appears that Western intelligence agencies assumed it would be easier and cheaper to mass hack cell phones than to recruit costly informants among holders of state secrets,” the agency noted.
The access to the gadgets had been obtained through a so-called zero-day vulnerability, a security hole in software unknown to its developers, according to the FSB.
The sheer volume of information gathered by Western spy agencies would have been impossible for humans to process just a few years ago, but AI is now being used to analyze it within minutes, it stressed.
According to the FSB, the investigation began in 2023 after experts at Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab detected unusual network activity on employees’ Apple devices.
A representative of Kaspersky Lab explained that those targeted by foreign intelligence had received an undetectable message via the standard Apple messaging app, which launched a spy program that quickly gained “complete control” of the phone.
Among other things, the malicious software could “start an audio recording for the next three hours, and it didn’t matter whether the phone had no connection or internet access. As soon as the phone regained connection, that audio recording would be sent to the attacker’s server,” he explained.
The US has been developing its cyber-espionage infrastructure for decades, particularly since the adoption of the Patriot Act in 2001. Introduced in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the legislation gave American intelligence agencies broad powers to demand information from IT companies in the name of national security.
Washington’s surveillance activities have not been limited to rival nations. In 2013, the US was caught spying on then-German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
