Russia announces that it has discovered a spying operation carried out by the United States, which allegedly infected thousands of iPhones.
The question of espionage between Russia and the United States is a very old subject, which hardly changes except by the novelty of the means implemented. Lately, the Russian authorities seem to increasingly suspect Apple of taking part. Officials have recently been ordered to abandon their iPhones, and today Moscow is denouncing a spy operation that would have gone through these devices.
Thousands of infected iPhones
Trust has never reigned between the United States and Russia. So, when we learn from the Russian authorities that an American spy operation has been discovered, despite the usual tweezers to be taken, we are ultimately not very surprised.
Computer security giant Kaspersky is believed to be behind the discovery, after spotting anomalies in its corporate Wi-Fi network earlier this year. ” Our experts have uncovered an extremely complex and well-targeted cyberattack using Apple’s mobile devices “says Eugene Kaspersky on his blog. The oldest traces of this attack still in progress date back to 2019.
If the Russian company believes that it is not the main target and cannot name the sponsor, the FSB is more direct. According to the special services of Moscow, their American counterparts are behind the operation, which would have made it possible to infect several thousand iPhones.
Did Apple cooperate?
If this first sentence is not surprising, the following is more unusual. Indeed, the FSB also accuses Apple in this story, reporting a “close cooperation between the Cupertino company and the National Security Agency (NSA), the American agency in charge of intelligence of electromagnetic origin.
Apple quickly denied ever working with a government to install backdoors and said it did not want to do so in the future. We remember that the tech giant had several years ago refused to help the FBI unlock the San Bernardino terrorist’s iPhone, which had forced law enforcement to go through another solution.
” US intelligence agencies have used IT companies for decades to collect data on internet users on a large scale without their knowledge “, for his part commented the Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov.
Sources: Kaspersky, Reuters
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