Russia's FSB Says Foreign Spyware Targeted Officials' Phones

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) announced on Tuesday that it has uncovered what it describes as a large-scale foreign espionage operation targeting the mobile devices of senior Russian officials. The agency alleges that foreign intelligence services used malicious software to extract sensitive data, intercept communications, and conduct covert audio and video surveillance.

According to the FSB, the operation enabled access to correspondence, phone calls, geolocation information, contact lists, and audio and video data from the devices and their surroundings. The agency stated that the malware provided foreign spies with valuable information about government activities, strategic planning, and broader public sentiment. An FSB official, quoted by the state news agency TASS, described the campaign as one of the largest foreign intelligence operations ever uncovered by the agency.

The FSB claimed that foreign intelligence services carried out the operation using the technical infrastructure of major international IT corporations. In materials distributed to Russian media, the FSB included footage of offices linked to content delivery and cybersecurity firms Cloudflare and...