Reports out of Berlin today say that a top aide of German Chancellor Angela Merkel was targeted by advanced malware commonly used by the NSA and Britain’s counterpart, the GCHQ.
The Backdoor.Regin spyware was discovered on the aide’s USB drive after she’d taken it home and put it into the computer at work again, only to be alerted by an antivirus program.
Officials say the drive only contained copies of the chancellor’s speeches, so no classified data was directly compromised. They say it is unclear how the drive was initially infected, but deny that the chancellery’s computer system is not believed to be compromised.
The Regin family of virii first emerged in 2011, and was predominantly used against targets in Russia and Saudi Arabia. There is speculation that Edward Snowden’s leaks, which reference 2010 NSA cyberattacks against European targets, were the first deployments of Regin.
The Regin programs can capture a lot of data from end users, including screen-captures and keyloggers. German officials say they are unsure if the latest incident is an attack by US or British spies, or simply one of the many cases of private hackers reprogramming the government-made malware for their own use.
And how are these weaklings going to respond? By tightening their relations with the NSA I bet.
Obama fine with "proportional" German response, as he said he would do re North Korea, which most likely didn't hack Sony?
That must be some real nasty stuff that Obongo´s white masters and the CIA has got on Merkel. The US got away with stealing almost all of Germany´s gold and they are free to spy, (or is it really any point in hiding it?) on whatever they want, the Germans dont say a beep…
Schröder, would have had Germany in the CSTO and hooked up on BRICS and the Russia-Chinese trade union by now
The last sentence is interesting. Imagine a private group placing spyware that will be taken to be US government spyware on prominent people's computers and then setting things up so that someone like Edward Snowden finds the spyware and "blows" the story to the press. It's an old stunt: A wants B to fight with C but neither B nor C want to fight each other. So A attacks B pretending to be C. B retaliates against C, who is outraged at being attacked without any justification, so he retaliates against B and this is then pointed to as proof that C is indeed attacking B! The point is all the more relevant as the Sony hacking is looking more and more like a scam designed to create an "incident" between the US and North Korea.
I wouldn't be surprised if all of our lackeys, vassal leaders and lickspittles go through the same thing.
Is that an angry stock picture of Merkel or a happy one? I bet she really doesn't care all that much anyway.
Empire USA has not a friend in the world, as it treats everyone like an enemy, how more simple could life be?