Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced that it had found an American espionage operation that used sophisticated surveillance software to infiltrate thousands of iPhones.
The Moscow-based company stated that the operation affected the device of dozens of Kaspersky Lab’s employees.
In a statement, the FSB, the principal successor to the Soviet-era KGB, said that several thousand Apple Inc devices had been infected, including those of domestic Russian users as well as foreign diplomats based in Russia and the former Soviet Union.
The statement further reads, “The FSB has uncovered an intelligence action of the American special services using Apple mobile devices”.
According to the FSB, the plot demonstrated close cooperation between Apple and the National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. agency in charge of cryptographic and communications intelligence and security.
The FSB provided no evidence that Apple assisted or was aware of the eavesdropping campaign.
Apple disputed the accusations in a statement.
“We have never worked with any government to insert a backdoor into any Apple product and never will”, the company stated in a statement.
The NSA did not respond to queries.
According to Kaspersky CEO Eugene Kaspersky, many of his employees’ phones were compromised during the operation, which his company described as “an extremely complex, professionally targeted cyberattack” that had targeted staff in top and middle management.
Kaspersky researcher Igor Kuznetsov said that his company had independently discovered unusual traffic on its corporate Wi-Fi network around the beginning of the year. He claims Kaspersky did not notify Russia’s Computer Emergency Response Team of its finding until early on Thursday.
He further said he could not comment on Moscow’s claims that Americans were behind the hacking or that thousands of others had been targeted.
“It’s very hard to attribute anything to anyone”, he continued.
In a blog post, Kaspersky stated that the oldest evidence of malware identified dated back to 2019.
The firm stated that as of the time of writing in June 2023, the attack is ongoing.
It went on to say, “We are quite confident that Kaspersky was not the main target of this cyberattack”.
In the espionage operation, the American hackers penetrated diplomats from Israel, Syria, China, and NATO nations.
Israeli officials refused to comment. Representatives from China, Syrian, and NATO were not immediately available to comment.
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