14 DAY TRIAL // The Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) announced yesterday that it detected malware on the computer networks of 20 Russian government organizations.
FSB's announcement come when the US is in turmoil following two separate cyber-incidents at the Democratic Party, the party of US presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
First came the news that the Democratic National Committee (DNC) was hacked, then news about a similar incident at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), the group managing Clinton's campaign donations site.
FSB hasn't blamed anyone, yet
The FSB did not point fingers at any particular state, but the US media was quick to interpret this announcement as the NSA "hacking back."
There have been plenty of reports of cyber-attacks against Russian state organizations that security vendors attributed to China in the past, so blaming the US may be a rush to judgment at this point.
FSB said they found malware capable of intercepting Internet traffic, logging keystrokes, taking screenshots, listening on phone calls, and spying on targets via cameras and microphones.
FSB: Malware was meant for cyber-espionage
Russian officials claim the malware penetrated their network masked as email attachments and was designed for cyber-espionage.
The malware infected computer networks at government, military and scientific institutions, and the FSB said each instance of the virus was tailored to the target it needed to infect.
The malware featured a modular design, meant to load the malicious code required to carry out attacks based on the particularities of each infected system and the data it could steal.
FSB is trying to convey a message
There are the classic traits of RATs and backdoor trojans, usually found in cyber-espionage operations, specific to APTs (advanced persistent threats), a term used to describe nation-states and industrial cyber-espionage groups.
Russia rarely makes this kind of announcements, and the timing of this one is strange. Some suggest that the FSB is trying to say, "Hey, we're getting hacked all the time as well, not just the US!"
In a world where most of the media has painted Russia as the villain of cyber-space, the country's officials are revealing that the reality is that every country engaged in covert cyber operations is victim and attacker at the same time.