by Cassie B., Natural News:
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- Russia’s FSB accused Western intelligence of hacking thousands of Russian officials’ smartphones through undetectable spyware.
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- The malware exploited zero-day vulnerabilities to access messages, calls, location, audio, and video without users’ knowledge.
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- Kaspersky Lab first detected the operation in 2023 on employee Apple devices via a silent malicious message.
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- AI is now used to analyze vast intercepted data faster than humans, making mass hacking cheaper than traditional espionage.
- The FSB opened a criminal investigation and warned Russian officials against discussing confidential info near any mobile device.
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Your phone is in your pocket, but is it really yours? Russia’s Federal Security Service answered that question darkly on Tuesday, claiming that Western intelligence agencies had silently commandeered the smartphones of Russian diplomats, politicians, military officers and journalists — listening, watching and tracking, all without their targets ever knowing. The FSB called it “one of the largest operations involving the installation of malicious software on mobile devices” ever uncovered, and said artificial intelligence has now made this kind of mass surveillance cheaper and faster than old-fashioned spycraft.
The announcement, made this week in Moscow, describes a sprawling covert operation that the FSB says began unraveling in 2023. The agency says compromised devices gave foreign intelligence services access to private messages, phone calls, geolocation data and even ambient audio and video from the phones’ surroundings. Whether or not the claims are fully verifiable, the details are striking enough to demand attention.
How the hack worked
The trail began not with a spy agency, but with a cybersecurity firm. Experts at Kaspersky Lab, the Russian cybersecurity company that the United States banned in 2024, first noticed unusual network activity on employees’ Apple devices in 2023. A Kaspersky representative explained that targets had received an undetectable message through Apple’s standard messaging app, which then silently deployed spyware that gained “complete control” of the device.
The malware’s capabilities were extensive. Among other things, the 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,” the Kaspersky representative said. “As soon as the phone regained connection, that audio recording would be sent to the attacker’s server.” Messages, contact lists, location data and video surveillance of the phone’s surroundings were also within reach.
The vulnerability exploited was what security professionals call a zero-day — a flaw in software that is unknown even to its own developers, leaving no patch available and no defense in place. The FSB did not publicly identify which countries it believes were responsible, nor did it disclose how many devices were affected.
AI changes the math on espionage
Perhaps the most consequential claim in the FSB’s statement is not about how the data was collected, but about what happens to it afterward. The sheer volume of intercepted communications gathered by Western spy agencies would have been impossible for humans to process just a few years ago, the agency said. Today, artificial intelligence is being used to analyze it within minutes.
