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US media to ignore WikiLeaks report about Kaspersky software and CIA — Russian senator

"All [officials] and the media will keep their mouse shut," Konstantin Kosachev said

MOSCOW, November 9. /TASS/. US media will not pay due attention to a WikiLeaks disclosure regarding a CIA spy software able to impersonate anti-virus software by Russia’s Kaspersky Lab company, a Russian senator said on Thursday.

"This was supposed to be a worldwide sensation. But it never will," said Konstantin Kosachev, who chairs the International Affairs Committee of the Federation Council, the upper chamber of the Russian parliament. "All [officials] and the media will keep their mouse shut."

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin, in his turn, said the report proves that Washington’s accusations of Russian involvement in numerous cyberattacks in the United States were "false stories."

"Who told us false stories about ‘Russian hackers’? They are as ‘Russian’ as I am a Bolshoi Theater ballet dancer," Rogozin wrote on his Facebook page on Thursday.

On Thursday, the WikiLeaks organization published the source code for the CIA hacking tool ‘Hive,’ which indicates that the agency-operated malware could mask itself under fake certificates and impersonate public companies, namely Kaspersky Lab. The three examples included in the source code build a fake certificate for Kaspersky Lab. In this way, if the target organization looks at the network traffic coming out of its network, it is likely to misattribute the CIA exfiltration of data to uninvolved entities whose identities have been impersonated.

US media have repeatedly accused Russia of involvement in cyberattacks on the US territory, including the 2016 presidential campaign. Those claims became one of the main pretexts for a new round of US sanctions, imposed on Russia last December. Moscow has strongly denied any involvement on many occasions.