Russia accuses US of hacking thousands of Apple iPhones in spy plot

MOSCOW - Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) said on Thursday it had uncovered an American espionage operation that compromised thousands of iPhones using sophisticated surveillance software.

Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab

said several of its senior employees’ devices were compromised in the operation.

The FSB, the main successor to the Soviet-era KGB, said in a statement that several thousand Apple devices had been infected, including those of domestic Russian subscribers as well as foreign diplomats based in Russia and the former Soviet Union.

“The FSB has uncovered an intelligence action of the American special services using Apple mobile devices,” it said in a statement.

The FSB said the plot showed “close cooperation” between Apple and the National Security Agency (NSA), the US agency responsible for cryptographic and communications intelligence and security.

The FSB provided no evidence that Apple cooperated with, or had any awareness of, the spying campaign.

In an alert published on its website, Russia’s Computer Emergency Response Team echoed the FSB’s warning and referred to research published on Thursday by Kaspersky Lab, which announced that “an extremely complex, professionally targeted cyber attack” had targeted an undisclosed number of employees in “top and middle management”.

The NSA declined to comment.

The White House did not immediately respond to e-mailed requests for comment.

Apple denied claims that it cooperated with American spies to monitor Russian iPhone users.

In a statement, the company said it has “never worked with any government to insert a backdoor into any Apple product and never will”. 

The FSB said the American spy operation had ensnared diplomats from Israel, Syria, China and North Atlantic Treaty Organisation members in the espionage campaign.

Israeli officials declined comment. Chinese, Syrian and Nato representatives were not immediately able to provide comment.

US snooping?

The United States is the world’s top cyber power in terms of intent and capability, according to Harvard University’s Belfer Centre Cyber Power Index 2022, followed by China, Russia, Britain and Australia.

Both the Kremlin and Russia’s Foreign Ministry pointed to the significance of the matter.

“The hidden data collection was carried out through software vulnerabilities in US-made mobile phones,” the ministry said in a statement. “The US intelligence services have been using IT corporations for decades in order to collect large-scale data of Internet users without their knowledge.”

Russian officials said the plot was uncovered as part of a joint effort by FSB officers and those of the Federal Guards Service, a powerful agency that runs the Kremlin bodyguard and was also once the KGB’s Ninth Directorate.

Officials in Russia, which Western spies say has constructed a very sophisticated domestic surveillance structure, have long questioned the security of American technology.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said all officials in the presidential administration knew that gadgets such as iPhones were “absolutely transparent”.

“Using them for official purposes is unacceptable and prohibited,” Mr Peskov said, adding that officials were free to use iPhones for private, non-official communication.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has always said he has no smartphone, though the Kremlin has said the former KGB spy does use the Internet from time to time.

Phone spyware

Kaspersky CEO Eugene Kaspersky said on Twitter that dozens of his employees’ phones were compromised in the operation.

Kaspersky researcher Igor Kuznetsov told Reuters that his company had independently discovered anomalous traffic on its corporate Wi-Fi network around the start of the year.

He said Kaspersky did not circulate its findings to Russia’s Computer Emergency Response Team until earlier on Thursday.

He said he could not comment on Moscow’s allegation that Americans were responsible for the hacking or that thousands of others had been targeted. “It’s very hard to attribute anything to anyone.”

Kaspersky said the spyware was delivered by an invisible message that took advantage of vulnerabilities in Apple’s iOS operating system. Information from the phone would then be spirited away to remote servers.

Kaspersky said the oldest traces of infection it discovered dated back to 2019. “As of the time of writing in June 2023, the attack is ongoing,” the company said.

It added that while its staff was hit, “we are quite confident that Kaspersky was not the main target of this cyber attack”.

It promised more updates in the coming days.

Although neither Russian officials nor Kaspersky has put forward evidence that Apple knew about the alleged spying, much less cooperated with it, the revelation is likely to deepen suspicions about Apple in Russia.

Earlier in 2023, the Kremlin told officials involved in preparations for Russia’s 2024 presidential election to stop using Apple iPhones because of concerns that the devices are vulnerable to Western intelligence agencies, the Kommersant newspaper reported. REUTERS