U.S. Hackers Said To Penetrate Foreign Networks

The U.S. has managed to infect computers in Iran, Pakistan, China and other foreign countries, sometimes with bugs so sophisticated they win the “race to the bare metal”—meaning they’ve reached the computer’s firmware, rendering the machines unrecoverable, according to Kaspersky Lab, the Russian cybersecurity firm, Kaspersky presenting its findings at a conference in Mexico, suggested the bugs appear to have been implanted by the National Security Agency and its military counterpart, the U.S. Cyber Command. The hacks were said to rival a U.S.-Israel effort that disabled centrifuges in Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.