Dozens of employee iPhones infected with spyware in Russia - Kaspersky Lab CEO
MOSCOW. June 1 (Interfax) - The chief executive of Kaspersky Lab, Yevgeny Kaspersky, has said that dozens of his employees had their Apple devices hacked and infected with spyware.
"Our company experts have detected an extremely sophisticated, professional targeted cyberattack with the use of mobile devices made by Apple," Kaspersky said on his blog.
The aim of the attacks was to secretly insert a spy module in the iPhones of Kaspersky Lab employees, both top and medium-level managers, he said.
"The attack is carried out with the aid of an invisible iMessage with a harmful attachment which, using a number of iOS vulnerabilities, runs on the device and installs the spy software," Kaspersky said, noting that the installation process was unnoticeable to the user.
"Next, the spy software passes, similarly unnoticeably, private data such as microphone recordings, photographs on messaging apps, the location and information on a number of other activities of the owner of an infected device, to remote servers," Kaspersky said.
Several dozen iPhones of company employees "turned out to have been infected with the new, extremely technologically complex spyware dubbed Triangulation," he said.
Because iOS is a closed operating system, there is no standard tool for detecting and removing this spyware, he said.
"One indirect sign of Triangulation being present in a device is a blocked possibility of updating iOS," Kaspersky said.
The company's experts have yet to find an effective way of deleting the spy software without losing user data.
"This can only be done with the aid of resetting an infected iPhone to factory settings, installing the latest version of iOS and the entire user environment from scratch. Otherwise, even if deleted from a device's memory through a reset, the Trojan spy Triangulation is capable of a repeat infection through vulnerabilities in an old iOS," Kaspersky said.
On Thursday, Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) said it had exposed an operation of American special services, which involved the use of malware installed on Apple hardware. Several thousands of Apple devices in Russia were infected, the FSB said.