According to a Ukrainian cybersecurity specialist, his company has not seen any proof of devices being hacked.
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Hackers have targeted the phones of Ukrainian leaders as Russia continues its invasion of Ukraine, according to a senior cybersecurity officer.
According to Victor Zhora, deputy head of Ukraine’s State Special Communications Service, phones used by the country’s public officials have been targeted on a regular basis.
“We notice a lot of efforts to hack Ukrainian officials’ phones, mostly through the propagation of malware,” Zhora said during an online press conference to commemorate the 100th day since Russian troops crossed the border.
So far, Zhora said, his service hasn’t seen any proof that Ukrainian devices have been hacked.
Following a series of exposes last year about how phones used by presidents, ministers, and other government officials had been targeted or infiltrated, the hacking of government leaders’ devices has risen to the top of the worldwide agenda.
The potential to hack into such gadgets remotely and discreetly using sophisticated surveillance software – commonly called a “zero-click” attack since it involves no input from the target – is especially feared. According to Reuters, top European Commission officials’ phones were targeted with zero-click malware in April.
Zhora claimed he and his colleagues were aware of the possibility of zero-click intrusions, but he wouldn’t say if such attacks had targeted them.
“We’ll keep an eye on it,” he added.
The announcement comes just days after authorities in 11 nations shut down the FluBot mobile phone fraud, which spread worldwide via phony text messages. In May, Dutch cybercops spearheaded an operation to combat the spyware, which infects Android phones via messages claiming to be from a delivery company or claiming that a person has a voicemail waiting. Hackers would then take bank account information from infected phones, sending messages to other phones in the user’s contact list, thereby spreading the fraud like a flu virus.
