Election Russian Hackers Are Now Targeting iPhone And Mac Users

After interfering with the most recent US Presidential elections that led to Donald Trump winning the race, the same Russian hackers now appear to be targeting the iPhone and Mac details of Americans. The group apparently developed advanced malware that is meant to retrieve sensitive information from Apple’s devices. With this being the case, any government official or users affiliated with the government in some way are at risk.

The hacker group in question is called APT28, Ars Technica reports, and it is the hacker group linked to election interference last year. Now, a cyber-security firm discovered that the group has developed and is using a malware package with sophisticated programming and is specifically geared towards Macs.

Bitdefender is that security firm and the company made a blog post about its discovery, explaining exactly how the malware targets Macs. According to the firm, the malware can actually log into the devices, take screens shots of whatever application was currently running, and even steal stored information in the devices.

“The analysis reveals the presence of modules that can probe the system for hardware and software configurations, grab a list of running processes and run additional files, as well as get desktop screenshots and harvest browser passwords,” the blog post reads. “But the most important module, from an intelligence-gathering perspective, is the one that allows the operator(s) to exfiltrate iPhone backups stored on a compromised Mac.”

Now, it is worth noting that regular people who have no connection to the government and don’t handle sensitive secrets, in general, have nothing to fear. It’s not likely that the Russian government is interested in stealing the information of the Average Joe. Apple will most likely create an update that would address this particular malware package as well, BGR reports.

For government employees using Macs or iPhones, however, it’s a different story. Between now and whenever Apple gets around to providing a fix for this issue, their devices are still quite vulnerable. As such, extra caution is advised.