How the NSA Spied on Antivirus Companies to Make Undetectable Malware
Russian antivirus company Kaspersky revealed recently that it was the target of hackers behind the Stuxnet and Duqu worms last year. The hackers have been attacking the company’s network for months, collecting data on its operations and software. But it turns out that intelligence agencies including the NSA and GCHQ have spied on antivirus companies for years, looking for exploitable vulnerabilities.
The new report comes from newly leaked documentation from NSA-whistleblower Edward Snowden, who made them available to The Intercept.
According to the documents, these agencies were spying on antivirus companies as far back a 2008, looking at their malware-detecting capabilities and adapting malware threats undetectable by these programs to serve for their covert spying operations. By spying on antivirus companies from various countries and reverse-engineering their software, the NSA and GCHQ were looking to stay ahead of the game and make sure that these programs would not be able to detect their own spying software.
