Researchers from multiple security firms largely agree that Turla was behind breaches of the US Department of Defense in 2008, and more recently the German Foreign Office and France's military. If nation-sponsored hacking was baseball, then Turla would not just be a Major League team-it would be a perennial playoff contender. Inside jokes, taunts, and mythical dragons Snake is developed and operated by Turla, one of the world's most sophisticated APTs, short for advanced persistent threats, a term for long-running hacking outfits sponsored by nation-states. The counter-hack took aim at Snake, the name of a sprawling piece of cross-platform malware that for more than two decades has been in use for espionage and sabotage.

FBI officials on Tuesday dropped a major bombshell: After spending years monitoring exceptionally stealthy malware that one of the Kremlin’s most advanced hacker units had installed on hundreds of computers around the world, agents unloaded a payload that caused the malware to disable itself.

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