Russia Believes Spies Planted Malware in State Systems

In this day and age, people are constantly fighting to gain access or stop people from accessing their information. Be it your home computer being attacked by ransomware or your countries national security systems experiencing hacks from within or outside, cyber warfare is escalating in a world where a computer is more than just a device to type up your work. Russia believes that their country may have recently been the target of one such attack, with the belief that spies planted malware in state-run systems.

The affected organisations, around 20 organisations in total, include  everything from public authorities to scientific and military institutions. The FSB (the Russian Federal Security Service) believes that the systems were deliberately infected as part of a larger cyber-espionage operation.

The FSB doesn’t believe this to be a one-off, with everything from filenames and the methods used to infect systems similar to other high-profile cyber-espionage operations conducted around the world.

What is even more curious is the fact that the malware was adapted to target specific characteristics of each of the targeted PC’s, all of which were sent the malware via a malicious email attachment.

The malware in question did everything from capturing your keystrokes to record audio or video using the computers microphones and webcams, potentially breaching and exposing information at all levels of the government.