Guy Faulconbridge reports:
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 dozens of its 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 Inc 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,” the FSB said in a statement.
Read more at Reuters.
But did Apple cooperate or collaborate with the NSA to enable that? That seemed to be the FSB’s allegation — and it’s an allegation that Apple flatly denies. In a follow-up report on Reuters, Apple provided a statement saying that it has “never worked with any government to insert a backdoor into any apple product and never will.”