Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reports:
More than a decade ago, researchers at antivirus company Kaspersky identified suspicious internet traffic of what they thought was a known government-backed group, based on similar targeting and its phishing techniques. Soon, the researchers realized they had found a much more advanced hacking operation that was targeting the Cuban government, among others.
Eventually the researchers were able to attribute the network activity to a mysterious — and at the time completely unknown — Spanish-speaking hacking group that they called Careto, after the Spanish slang word (“ugly face” or “mask” in English), which they found buried within the malware’s code.
Careto was never publicly linked to a specific government. But TechCrunch has now learned that the researchers who first discovered the group were convinced that Spanish government hackers were behind Careto’s espionage operations.
Read more at TechCrunch.