Earlier this month the U.S. Justice Department announced the National Security Agency (NSA), along with other agencies, had successfully identified infrastructure for Snake malware, which had been used by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) to victimize organizations throughout the United States and around the world for nearly 20 years.
According to the release, the court-authorized operation, code-named MEDUSA, disrupted a global peer-to-peer network of computers compromised by sophisticated malware, called “Snake”. For nearly 20 years, versions of the Snake malware was used to steal sensitive documents from hundreds of computer systems in at least 50 countries, which have belonged to North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) member governments, journalists and other targets of interest to the Russian Federation.