Russia’s FSB Thwarts Foreign Spy Operation Using Malware on Russian Officials’ Smartphones
Smartphone
MOSCOW (Sputnik) — Foreign intelligence agencies wanted to receive data on sentiments in the Russian society through smartphones of high-ranking Russian officials, an employee of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Tuesday. The FSB said that it had revealed a scheme by foreign intelligence agencies to extract information from smartphones of high-ranking Russian employees infected with malicious software. This information was secretly «filmed» by foreign intelligence agencies using the capabilities of US IT companies Fastly and Cloudflare. «The collection of data on contacts, plans and sentiments in society was planned to be carried out directly without intermediaries like NGOs,» the employee said in a video released by the FSB. Individuals on whom foreign intelligence agencies collect compromising information through hacking smartphones are then added to the sanctions lists of Western countries and are therefore put under pressure, the FSB said. «Attempts to collect data were carried out through covert access to the contents of correspondence, wiretapping, acoustic and video monitoring of the environment around the devices, as well as the collection of geolocation and contact data,» the employee said. Foreign intelligence agencies hacked the smartphones of high-ranking Russian employees, believing that it was cheaper to get the necessary information than to recruit expensive informants, according to the video. «It can already be stated that this is a multi-level operation with far-reaching consequences and serious risks, which involves the coordination of several states,» the employee said.
