A Fishy WikiLeaks Dump Targets Russia For a Change | Wired - Sept. 20, 2017 |

At this point, it's commonplace for US government power dealings, investigations, and surveillance tactics to come to light, whether from leaks or whistleblowers. But a new release from WikiLeaks pivoted the focus to Russia, offering a look at some technical aspects of how Moscow spies on its citizens online.

Much of the information in the dump was already publicly available; the release wasn't exactly the type of radical secret-sharing WikiLeaks typically engages in. And security and privacy analysts agree that the documents support, rather than expand, the existing picture of how Russian surveillance works. But with oppressive surveillance and censorship posing an increasingly grim human-rights threat in Russia, experts caution against writing the release off altogether.

"It doesn't solve the problem that we know very few things about what's going on on the side of the FSB," says Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist who specializes in investigating digital surveillance and Russian government intelligence like the Federal Security Service. "But nevertheless I decided that I need to praise this release, because it's more than nothing. At least we got some hint about the data exchange interface between telecoms and secret services."
Spy Files

The 35 documents in the WikiLeaks "Spy Files Russia" dump pertain to a St. Petersburg-based company known as Peter-Service, a software and technology vendor that apparently contracts on Russian government surveillance projects. Many of the documents describe how Peter-Service participates in Russia's digital surveillance operation,known as System for Operative Investigative Activities (SORM). Specifically, the release includes information on how the company works with state agencies to collect and share mobile data.

How Kaspersky AV reportedly was caught helping Russian hackers steal NSA secrets | ArsTechnica - Oct. 11, 2017 |

Reports say Israeli spies burrowed inside Kaspersky's network caught Russia red handed.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell when it reported that Russian government hackers located confidential National Security Agency material improperly stored on an employee's home computer with help from Kaspersky antivirus, which happened to be installed. On Tuesday, The New York Times and The Washington Post provided another shocker: the Russian hackers were caught in the act by spies from Israel, who were burrowed deep inside Kaspersky's corporate network around the time of the theft.

Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab disclosed the intrusion into its network in mid-2015. Kaspersky released a detailed report that said some of the attack code shared digital fingerprints first found in the Stuxnet worm that sabotaged Iran's nuclear program. When combined with other clues--including the attackers' targeting of entities located in the US, which is off limits to the NSA--most analysts concluded that the 2014 hack was carried out by Israel. At the time, Kaspersky Lab researchers said that the hackers appeared most interested in data the company had amassed on nation-sponsored hackers.

Kaspersky Lab has never helped, nor will help, any government in the world with its cyberespionage efforts. pic.twitter.com/DXqm55caNP

— Kaspersky Lab (@kaspersky) October 10, 2017

○ Dutch Hackers Infiltrated Kremlin's Cozy Bear in 2014

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